Log in or Sign up

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. adj. Of or relating to an exponent.
  2. adj. Mathematics Containing, involving, or expressed as an exponent.
  3. adj. Mathematics Expressed in terms of a designated power of e, the base of natural logarithms.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Of or pertaining to an exponent or exponents; involving variable exponents.
  2. n. The function expressed by the infinite series 1 + x + ½x + ⅙x +, etc., or the Napierian base raised to the power indicated by the variable. Thus, ex = exp. x is the exponential of x.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. Relating to an exponent.
  2. adj. Expressed in terms of a power of e.
  3. adj. In modern English, used to describe a large quantity of an object or objects.
  4. n. Any function that has an exponent as an independent variable.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Pertaining to exponents; involving variable exponents
  2. adj. changing over time in an exponential manner, i. e. increasing or decreasing by a fixed ratio for each unit of time.

WordNet 3.0

  1. adj. of or involving exponents
  2. n. a function in which an independent variable appears as an exponent

Examples

  • “I use the term exponential to refer to compounding's effect to set it off from those who use linear or arithmetic models.”

    Further Discussion of Compounding Suggestions . . .. . . behind the curtain . . .

  • “MCINTYRE (voice over): Citing what he calls the exponential rise in the number of deaths both U.S. and Iraqi, along with the failure of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to disarm the warring militias, Republican Senator John Warner is sounding a dire warning.”

    CNN Transcript Oct 6, 2006

  • “(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) (SOUNDS) MCINTYRE (voice-over): Citing what he calls the exponential rise in the number of deaths, both U.S. and Iraqi, along with the failure of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to disarm the warring militias, Republican Senator John Warner is sounding a dire warming while he still has hope, it's fading fast.”

    CNN Transcript Oct 6, 2006

  • “JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SENIOR PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Citing what he calls the exponential rise in the number of deaths, both U.S. and Iraqi, along with the failure of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to disarm the warring militias, Republican Senator John Warner is sounding a dire warning: While he still has hope, it's fading fast.”

    CNN Transcript Oct 6, 2006

  • “PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Citing what he calls the exponential rise in the number of deaths, both U.S. and Iraqi, along with the failure of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to disarm the warring militias, Republican Senator John Warner is sounding a dire warning: while he still has hope, it's fading fast.”

    CNN Transcript Oct 7, 2006

  • “JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SENIOR PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Citing what he calls the exponential rise in the name of deaths, both U.S. and Iraqi, along with the failure of the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to disarm the warring militias, Republican Senator John Warner is sending a dire warning.”

    CNN Transcript Oct 7, 2006

  • “PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Citing what he calls the exponential rise in the number of death, both U.S. and Iraqi, along with the failure of the government Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to disarm the warring militias.”

    CNN Transcript Oct 7, 2006

  • “MCINTYRE (voice-over): Citing what he calls the exponential rise in the number of deaths, both U.S. and Iraqi, along with the failure of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to disarm the warring militias, Republican Senator John Warner is sounding a dire warning.”

    CNN Transcript Oct 6, 2006

  • “The fingers of the explosions, shooting off in exponential pathways, are a sort of Manifest Destiny writ large across the sky.”

    “The Nearby Explosions”

  • “Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about.”

    Boing Boing

Show 10 more examples...

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘exponential’.

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • reesetee Now *there's* a thought.... Jul 8, 2007

  • oroboros Just slip it a Mickey Finn and be a math genius! (hee hee) Jul 6, 2007

  • reesetee If that's the case, oroboros, my number governor is a damned tyrant. ;-) Jul 6, 2007

  • oroboros Gotta be designed for it or there wouldn't BE "exponential numbers". Maybe most brains have a "number governor" installed; the ones that don't are right at home with exponentials and equations like e^iπ = -1 and so on. Jul 6, 2007

  • seanahan There is a fundamental human difficultly in dealing with exponential numbers. The mind has evolved to understand small quantities, the integers. The rational numbers, or fractions, are probably a rather recent invention, other than perhaps, I'll take 1/4 of that Woolly Mammoth we just killed. The human brain is just not designed to deal with numbers on an exponential scale.

    Take, for example, the problem of the grains of rice on the chess board. At first glance, 1, 2, 4, 8, doesn't seem like a big deal. Of course, if you do the math, 2^64 is more grains of rice than have ever existed, but intuitively, it doesn't seem to be. Jul 6, 2007

  • uselessness More like a curvy L... or a J, as long as it's not one of those Js that curves back up on the short side. ;-) Jul 5, 2007

  • seanahan I took an intro biology class where they referred to it as a "J-shaped curve", which seemed like a pointless simplification. Jul 5, 2007

  • whichbe what if exponentially more people understood this word? Jul 5, 2007

  • azzurre if more people understood this word.... Mar 2, 2007

‘exponential’ has been looked up 1820 times, loved by 1 person, added to 24 lists, commented on 9 times, and has a Scrabble score of 20.