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/kəmbˈəstʃən/ Listen

noun

Combustion n.

The state of burning.

(Chem.) The combination of a combustible with a supporter of combustion, producing heat, and sometimes both light and heat. "Combustion results in common cases from the mutual chemical action and reaction of the combustible and the oxygen of the atmosphere, whereby a new compound is formed."

Supporter of combustion (Chem.), a gas, as oxygen, the combination of which with a combustible, as coal, constitutes combustion.

Violent agitation; confusion; tumult. (Obs.) "There (were) great combustions and divisions among the heads of the university." "But say from whence this new combustion springs."

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Etymology of 'Combustion'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Combustion" Quotes from Famous Books

... have been fired as many times as you please with the heaviest charges of that powder without its sustaining the slightest injury. Our wise Ordnance people, however, having taken a fancy to a 'slow combustion powder,' whose force, instead of being expended in the breech, is sustained throughout the whole length of the gun, as the particles of powder ignite and expand, bethought themselves they would, for cheapness' sake, ...

— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson

... and the mail will have carried it everywhere: so wonderful a machine is this of ours for disseminating intelligence! Think of it! When my father was born——but that is another story. To return: we had here the elements of such a combustion as I dread to think of—your cousin and the journal. Let him but glance an eye upon that column of print, and where were we? It is easy to ask; not so easy to answer, my young friend. And let me tell you, this sheet is the Viscount's usual reading. It is my conviction he had ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... would have preferred to write it, Albert and Victoria. The fiery little spurt of revolt in Canada, called rather ambitiously, "The Canadian Rebellion," had ended in smoke, and the outburst of Chartism, from the spontaneous combustion of sullen and long-smothered discontent among the working classes, had been extinguished, partly by a fog of misapprehension and misdirection, partly by a process of energetic stamping out. The shameful Chinese opium war, the Cabul ...

— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... and there in Scripture, fire stands for a symbol of destroying power. But that is a less frequent use than that in which it stands as a symbol of life. In a very real sense life is warmth and death is cold. Is not respiration a kind of combustion? Do not physiologists tell us that? Is not the centre of the system and the father of all physical life that great blazing sun which radiates heat? And is not this promise, 'I will send fire on the earth,' the assurance that into the midst of our death there shall come the quick energy ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... an asthmatic old man about to suffer spontaneous combustion," said Honor moving away from the vicinity of the American organ, vexed to see the transparent arts practised by Mrs. Fox to ...

— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

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