systole
/ˈsɪstəli/ noun
Forms systoles
- noun (physiology) The rhythmic contraction of the heart, by which blood is driven through the arteries.
- noun (prosody, rhetoric) A shortening of a naturally long vowel.
- noun (mathematics) The shortest noncontractible loop on a compact metric space.
- noun (biology) The contraction of the contractile vesicles in certain algae, plasmodia, and zoospores.
Antonyms
Etymology
Borrowed from New Latin, from Ancient Greek συστολή (sustolḗ), from συστέλλω (sustéllō, “to contract”), from σύν (sún, “together”) + στέλλω (stéllō, “to send”).
Webster’s 1913
- noun The shortening of the long syllable.
- noun The contraction of the heart and arteries by which the blood is forced onward and the circulation kept up; --correlative to diastole.
Sources: Wiktionary · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “systole”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details