eccentricate

English

Etymology

eccentric +‎ -ate

Verb

eccentricate (third-person singular simple present eccentricates, present participle eccentricating, simple past and past participle eccentricated)

1. (transitive) To move to the periphery; to marginalize.
   • 1783, John Young, A Criticism on the Elegy, or 1789, Robert Potter, The Art of Criticism:

     Gray owes much to scowering, as does Virgil to wire-drawn epithets; whilst Milton cramps with hard words and eccentricates by transposition,

   • 1803, Thomas Pownall, Memorial addressed to the Sovereigns of Europe and the Atlantic:

     [...] have, by the intrigues of an ignorant, presumptuous, speculating faction, been absorbed in the vortex of the great continental power; have been eccentricated from their former orbit, and must now perform their future [...]

   • 1989, Julian B. Barbour, Absolute Or Relative Motion?, volume 1, page 300:

     It was, he asserted, simply asking too much of human credibility to deny that all these identical equantized, and eccentricated, and perfectly phased epicycles did not have a common origin - either in the motion of the earth around the sun or the sun around the earth.

Quotations

• 1891, Daniel Kinnear Clark, The Steam Engine, page 339:

  All the fire-bars are movable; they are supported at their outer ends on a transverse shaft, called "the eccentricated shaft," a shaft formed of a series of cranks or eccentrics [...] The motion of the eccentricated shaft is derived from a cone-pulley of three speeds.

Related terms

• eccentric