Definitions

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

  • noun The act or result of decomposing; disintegration.
  • noun Chemistry Separation into constituents by chemical reaction.
  • noun Biology Breakdown or decay of organic materials.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act or process of separating the constituent elements of a compound body or substance; analysis; resolution; specifically, the process of reducing an organic body to a state of decay or putrefaction.
  • noun The state of being decomposed or resolved; release from previous combinations; disintegration; specifically, decay of an organic body.
  • noun [With ref. to decomposite, q. v.] The act of compounding together things which are themselves compound; a combination of compounds.

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

  • noun The act or process of resolving the constituent parts of a compound body or substance into its elementary parts; separation into constituent part; analysis; the decay or dissolution consequent on the removal or alteration of some of the ingredients of a compound; disintegration
  • noun The state of being reduced into original elements.
  • noun obsolete Repeated composition; a combination of compounds.
  • noun Same as Resolution of forces, under Resolution.
  • noun the division of light into the prismatic colors.

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

  • noun A biological process through which organic material is reduced to e.g. compost
  • noun The act of taking something apart, e.g. for analysis
  • noun The splitting (of e.g. a matrix, an atom, or a compound) into constituent parts

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

  • noun (biology) the process of decay caused by bacterial or fungal action
  • noun in a decomposed state
  • noun the organic phenomenon of rotting
  • noun (chemistry) separation of a substance into two or more substances that may differ from each other and from the original substance
  • noun the analysis of a vector field

Etymologies

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