cnoidal
/ˈknɔɪd(ə)l/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
1
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Describes a travelling wave whose amplitude is constricted; e.g. a wave in shallow water.
Etymology
Coined by Diederik Korteweg and Gustav de Vries in their paper in Philosophical Magazine (1895, series 5, vol. 39, pp. 422-443) to describe a class of solutions to the KdV equation which involve a Jacobi elliptic function. The Jacobi elliptic function involved is commonly written as cn(x|m), and the term cnoidal was designed to be analogous to sinusoidal, the word describing waves which involve the sine function.
Frequently Paired Words
dnoidal
snoidal