Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act of moving from place to place.
  • noun The ability to move from place to place.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Movement from place to place; progressive motion, as of a living being or a vehicle; the act of moving from point to point; also, the capability of moving in this manner.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of moving from place to place.
  • noun The power of moving from place to place, characteristic of the higher animals and some of the lower forms of plant life.
  • noun The name of a song and a dance, briefly popular in the 1960's.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The ability to move from place to place, or the act of doing so.
  • noun biology Self-powered motion by which a whole organism changes its location through walking, running, jumping, crawling, swimming or flying.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun self-propelled movement
  • noun the power or ability to move

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin locō, from a place, ablative of locus, place + motion.]

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Examples

  • _ And I have insisted particularly upon the dependence of representations of locomotion upon knowledge of three-dimensional existence, because, before proceeding to the relations of Subject and Form in painting, I want to impress once more upon the reader the distinction between the _locomotion of things_ (locomotion active or passive) and what, in my example of the _mountain which rises, _ I have called the _empathic movement of lines.

    The Beautiful An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics Vernon Lee 1895

  • Now of the three kinds of motion that there are-motion in respect of magnitude, motion in respect of affection, and motion in respect of place-it is this last, which we call locomotion, that must be primary.

    Physics Aristotle 2002

  • The locomotion is in many fundamental respects like that of the human being.

    Archive 2009-08-01 AYDIN 2009

  • The locomotion is in many fundamental respects like that of the human being.

    How a snail moves - Part 2 AYDIN 2009

  • The spines on the legs of cockroaches were earlier considered to be sensory, but observations of their locomotion on sand and wire meshes has demonstrated that they help in locomotion on difficult terrain.

    La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha 2008

  • Rough terrain locomotion has mainly relied on rigid body systems, such as crawlers and leg mechanisms.

    Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Soft Robots 2006

  • Rough terrain locomotion has mainly relied on rigid body systems, such as crawlers and leg mechanisms.

    Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Soft Robots 2006

  • So I was interested to learn that more recent studies with modern cameras have shown that horse locomotion is actually very different to what he thought:

    Swedish speakers, please help! amuchmoreexotic 2005

  • And the moisture of the element seems well adapted to counteract the rigidity of their fibres; and as their exertions in locomotion, and the pressure of some parts on others, are so much less than in the bodies of land animals.

    Note VII 1803

  • Therefore, any affection causing a sensation and sign of pain which is increased by the bearing of weight upon the affected member, or by the moving of such a distressed part, results in an irregularity in locomotion, which is known as lameness or claudication.

    Lameness of the Horse Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 John Victor Lacroix

Comments

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  • Here's a snippet from a blog somewhere:

    >: * Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion" hit #1 in 1962, but there was never any

    >: actual dance by that name

    >Most certainly there was a dance called the Loco-Motion. People used to

    >do it all the time. You must be joking.

    Retroactively, perhaps. According to co-writer Carole King (_Billboard Book of Number One Hits_, 1985 edition), "There never was a dance called the loco-motion until after it was a number one hit record... everyone said, 'how does this dance go,' so Little Eva had to make up a dance."

    February 24, 2008

  • Also seen as Loco-motion when referring to the dance

    February 25, 2008