denomination - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Middle English denominacioun, from Old French denominacion, from Latin dēnōminātiō.[1] By surface analysis, denominate +‎ -ion.

denomination (countable and uncountable, plural denominations)

  1. (uncountable) The act of naming or designating.
  2. (countable) That by which anything is denominated or styled; an epithet; a name, designation, or title; especially, a general name indicating a class of like individuals.
    • 1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter VII, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 46:
      "Will you allow me to present Sir George Evelyn to you?—the most accomplished coquet that ever 'Dealt destruction round the land On all he judged a foe;' under which denomination he ranks all women."
  3. (countable, religion) A class, or society of individuals, called by the same name; a subdivision of a religion.
    Hyponyms: order, sect
    She follows the Ahmadiyya denomination of Islam.
    • 2011, Paul M. Collins, Barry A. Ensign-George, Denomination: Assessing an Ecclesiological Category, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 6:
      Denomination does more than create space in which to discern, however. It also provides a means for living out differing forms of a faithful Christian life.
  4. (countable) A unit in a series of units of weight, money, etc.
    What denomination is that money? They are all 50 euro notes.
    • 1896, William Graham Sumner, chapter 11, in History of Banking in the United States:
      In 1823, a further issue of treasury notes was ordered to the amount of $100,000, in denominations of five to seventy-five cents, receivable for dues to the State.
    • 2010, Göran Grimvall, “Chapter 1: Numbers”, in Quantify! A Crash Course in Smart Thinking, Johns Hopkins University Press, →ISBN:
      The French army in the 1870s used no fewer than 425 different rope diameters for its hot air balloons. Then Captain Charles Renard devised a system that reduced the number to 17. He got the bright idea that the diameter should increase in steps governed by a certain factor rather than, for instance, by a certain width expressed in millimeters. His concept now has widespread use in technology. It is also used, approximately, in the denominations of coins and bills, as in the sequence of coins of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cents, 1 and 2 euros, in 16 of the 27 countries in the European Union (fig. 1.5). The ISO standard defines four base series for Renard numbers, denoted R5, R10, R20, and R40. In the R5 series, each number is larger than the preceding one by the factor 10 5 ≈ 1.584. {\displaystyle {\sqrt[{5}]{10}}\approx 1.584.} {\displaystyle {\sqrt[{5}]{10}}\approx 1.584.} For practical reasons, the numbers are slightly rounded, as shown in table 1.5 for R5 and R10. They take the same structure within every decade and are evenly spread when plotted on a logarithmic scale.

act of naming, designation

name, designation, or title

class or society with the same name, a sect

unit in a series of units

  1. ^ “denomination, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.