wave front
1
6.1
- noun
- Specialized
:
frente de onda
- As the earthquake struck, the wave front expanded outward, connecting all points affected at the same instant.
Examples
-
The wave front of the sound traveled quickly through the room, reaching everyone's ears at the same moment.
-
And you see a wave front goes all the way down quite quickly.
-
The other thing this is telling us that the wave front is a sphere.
-
And the distance between these two wave fronts is your radiation.
-
We'll get some sense as to how wave fronts hit the beach and slowly fade as they climb up the sand.
-
Diagram: The glow of blue light left by a muon streaking through the ice forms a "Cherenkov" wave-front similar in shape to the bow wave made by a speedboat.
Academic text (2000) -
When a boat travels across the water, it creates a visible wave front that spreads across the surface.
Synonyms
4
8.1
An invisible surface joining points reached by a wave at the same time
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a surface connecting all points reached at the same time by a moving wave' is directly compositional as the 'front' (leading edge or boundary) of a 'wave'. Even if the example 'front' definition given is meteorological, the spatial sense of 'front' (the forward edge) is common cross-linguistically and accessible to B1 learners who know both words, so the overall meaning is predictable from the constituents.
Etymology
Wave front comes from the picture of ripples in a pond: when you drop a stone, a moving ring shows all points the wave reaches at the 'same time'. The name links wave (the ripple) and front (the moving edge), so it now means the moving surface of light or sound where points are reached together.