oscillating

oscillating (comparative more oscillating, superlative most oscillating)

1. Moving in a repeated back-and-forth motion; coming and going.

   Coordinate terms: reciprocating, rotating, vibrating

   • 1797, An Address to the Nation, Shewing the Necessity of Forming an Armed Association, in Consequence of the Conspiracy of the Republicans in Ireland to Subvert the Constitution, pages 140–1:

     But if he be admitted to have been fixed, as he declares, it admits of proof that he has a species of fixedness belonging to him of a very oscillating kind; which may be best illustrated by that of a ship riding off at sea by a single anchor, which at every turn of the tide swings about, and brings her head round to a point of the compass diametrically opposite to that it stood toward before.

   • 1891, Joshua M. Van Cott, Jr., “Pathology”, in The Brooklyn Medical Journal, volume 5, page 741:

     In general the experiments proved that in nephritis the secretion of the gastric mucosa is vitiated. This vitiation is exceedingly oscillating.

   • 2014, Charles Camic, “Periphery toward Center and Back: Scholarship on the History of Sociology, 1945–2012”, in Roger E. Backhouse, Philippe Fontaine, editors, A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences, →ISBN, page 101:

     When examining work on the history of sociology, however, one finds a more oscillating pattern: disciplinary marginality, followed by greater centrality, followed by a return to the margins.

2. (mathematics) Describing a function or divergent series that moves between multiple values.
   • 2002, Eduard Feireisl, “Viscous and/or heat conducting compressible fluids”, in Susan Friedlander, Denis Serre, editors, Handbook of Mathematical Fluid Dynamics, →ISBN, page 355:

     Highly oscillating sequences converge in the weak topology, i.e., the topology of convergence of integral means.

oscillating

1. present participle and gerund of oscillate

• “oscillating”, in Collins English Dictionary.