POTENTIAL ENERGY • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Potential energy

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/pətˈɛnʃəl ˈɛnərdʒi/ Listen

adjective

Potential adj.

Being potent; endowed with energy adequate to a result; efficacious; influential. (Obs.) "And hath in his effect a voice potential."

Existing in possibility, not in actuality. "A potential hero." "Potential existence means merely that the thing may be at ome time; actual existence, that it now is."

Potential cautery. See under Cautery.

Potential energy. (Mech.) See the Note under Energy.

Potential mood, or Potential mode (Gram.), that form of the verb which is used to express possibility, liberty, power, will, obligation, or necessity, by the use of may, can, must, might, could, would, or should; as, I may go; he can write.

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Etymology of 'Potential energy'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Potential energy" Quotes from Famous Books

... the natives lies a source of great future power for Liberia. When immigration from the United States shall assume such proportions that numbers of interior settlements can be made which shall be radiating centres of civilization, the enormous potential energy of native intelligence and labor will be brought to bear on the development of the country with ...

— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson

... character. He was, as he remained through life, remarkable for that kind of sturdy strength which goes with a certain awkwardness and even sluggishness. To use a modern phrase, he had a great store of 'potential energy,' which was not easily convertible to purposes of immediate application. His mind swarmed with ideas, which would not run spontaneously into the regulation moulds. His mother's influence is perceptible in an early taste ...

— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... observance of the letter of the social law for which the Hawtreys had stood for generations. On several occasions she had seen a Revercomb really "roused," and when the transformation was once achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the force of it. And this terrible potential energy in her husband's stock would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity. She hadn't been married to a Revercomb for nothing, she ...

— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... particular order of effect which the stage, and the stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose. The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy to which the dramatist must ...

— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... containing within itself the quantifiable capacity of transformation. The objective correlatives of the different classes of sensible experiences are found to be different forms which this Energy assumes—the kinetic energy of a mass in motion, the radiant energy of Light, the energy of Heat, the potential energy of chemical separation, etc.—all these have now at length been shown to be forms of one real thing capable under appropriate conditions of being transmuted into each other and of which not only the inter-transmutability but the equivalent values ...

— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip