Definitions

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

  • noun An alloy of 45 percent nickel and 55 percent copper, used chiefly in electrical instruments because of its constant resistance under variations of temperature.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An alloy consisting of 60 per cent, copper and 40 per cent, nickel.

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

  • noun a copper-nickel alloy composed of approximately 55 per cent copper and 45 per cent nickel, with high electrical resistance and a low temperature coefficient; it is used as resistance wire and in thermocouples.

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

  • noun An alloy of copper and nickel whose resistivity is constant over a wide temperature range

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

  • noun an alloy of copper and nickel with high electrical resistance and a low temperature coefficient; used as resistance wire

Etymologies

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

[From constant.]

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Examples

  • · Metal alloys of a special composition (novoconstant, constantan) a » 0

    2. Fundamental Quantities of Electrical Engineering 1991

  • Recently, however, an ingenious device has been published by Hamilton Wilson, by which a continuous piece of constantan wire is coated with silver in successive sections by electroplating, and each pair of junctions between a silver-plated and an unplated portion acts as a silver-constantan couple.

    Archibald V. Hill - Nobel Lecture 1965

  • A rectal probe housing a linear array of seven copper-constantan thermocouples was designed to measure colonic temperatures simultaneously at positions anterior to, within and posterior to the region of the colon flanked by the CCHE.

    ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science 2009

  • A rectal probe housing a linear array of five copper-constantan thermocouples was designed to measure colonic temperatures simultaneously at positions anterior to, within, and posterior to the region of the colon flanked by the countercurrent heat exchanger.

    ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science 2009

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