Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The science of heat.

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

  • noun The science of heat.

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

  • noun archaic that branch of physics dealing with the science of heat
  • noun archaic thermodynamics

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Coined by William Whewell, 1831, along with photistics.

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Examples

  • Electricity seems destined to annex the whole field, not merely of optics, but probably also of thermotics.

    Steam, Steel and Electricity James W. Steele

  • Laplace, and a Gauss, and which is the glory of a Leverrier, a Peirce, and their companions in science, it serves as a part of the necessary scaffolding by which that skill is attained, -- of the necessary discipline by which their power was exercised and made available for the solution of the great problems of astronomy, optics, and thermotics, which have been solved in our century.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 30, April, 1860 Various

  • In order to explain fully these relations it would be necessary to develop from first principles the sciences of optics and thermotics, and to do this in a popular manner would require several lectures.

    Religion and Chemistry 1880

  • a science preliminary to the rest of thermotics, as to place the study of the attraction of the bodies, which compose the universe in general, before that of the particular terrestrial bodies, which alone we can experimentally know.

    Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews Thomas Henry Huxley 1860

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