spreading-out

Updated: May 21, 2025

The reason of this spreading-out or "dispersion" is that the various colours have different wave-lengths, and consequently meet with different degrees of retardation in traversing the denser medium of the prism.

Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke - A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century: Fourth Edition

This might be due to a purely mental process; or possibly to a sort of spreading-out of the brain process in the visual centre, giving the result that whenever, by the revival of the brain process, the mental image is brought back again to mind, this spreading out shows itself by an enlargement of the memory image.

James Mark Baldwin - The Story of the Mind

At last the cuckoo stopped, in front of a sort of banked-up terrace, in the centre of which grew a strange-looking plant with large, smooth, spreading-out leaves, and on the two topmost leaves, their splendid wings glittering in the sunshine, sat two magnificent butterflies.

Mrs. Molesworth - The Cuckoo Clock

Into which already thousands upon thousands were hurrying in search of homes a new movement of the race its first spreading-out over the mighty continent upon its mightier destiny.

James Lane Allen - The Choir Invisible

"The result of long-continued disturbance was found to be the spreading-out of the rings in breadth, the outer rings pressing outward, while the inner rings press inward.

Edward Huntington Williams - A History of Science — Volume 3

At last the cuckoo stopped, in front of a sort of banked-up terrace, in the centre of which grew a strange-looking plant with large, smooth, spreading-out leaves, and on the two topmost leaves, their splendid wings glittering in the sunshine, sat two magnificent butterflies.

Mrs. Molesworth - The Cuckoo Clock