Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In a centripetal manner; with tendency toward a center; by centripetal force.

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

  • adverb towards a centre or axis
  • adverb using centripetal force

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From centripetal + ly adverbial suffix.

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Examples

  • The mother country, its agents, its superior legal culture—these acted centripetally, before Independence.

    A History of American Law Lawrence M. Friedman 1985

  • The mother country, its agents, its superior legal culture—these acted centripetally, before Independence.

    A History of American Law Lawrence M. Friedman 1985

  • The mother country, its agents, its superior legal culture—these acted centripetally, before Independence.

    A History of American Law Lawrence M. Friedman 1985

  • Attractive women of nineteen and of twenty-nine are alike in their breezy confidence; on the contrary, the exigent womb of the twenties does not pull the outside world centripetally around itself.

    Tender is the Night 2003

  • All I ask of you is to act centripetally in entering the debate which is of vital concern to South Africa and all its people.

    ANC Daily News Briefing 1992

  • Therefore, this vibratory action is neutralized by attaching two additional like wheels to the common plane, with their rotation advanced 90 degrees, so that the second pair are imposing their equal arc centripetal force at the same time the first set of wheels are describing the two major and two minor arc centripetally imposed forces.

    Chapter 4 1990

  • He came to the conclusion that the hypoplasia of motor nerve cells of the ventral horn and of other nerve cells of the same hemisection of the spinal cord resulted from lack of stimuli centripetally transmitted by nerve fibers of the first differentiated neurons.

    Nobel Lecture The Nerve Growth Factor: Thirty-Five Years Later 1986

  • If the reefrat can accelerate its own body without reaction, perhaps it can also accelerate gas molecules centripetally, also without reaction.

    Starchild Omnibus Pohl, Frederik & Williamson, Jack 1963

  • The blood-clot occupying its centre now contracts, the margins rapidly become approximated centripetally, and a small circular dark spot only remains, which is later replaced by a small red cicatrix.

    Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 Being Mainly a Clinical Study of the Nature and Effects of Injuries Produced by Bullets of Small Calibre George Henry Makins

  • Still entangled with my slumbers, I hesitated to respond to the friendly hands that were everywhere thrust centripetally toward me.

    Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 85, January, 1875 Various

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