immersion

From late Middle English, borrowed from Late Latin immersiō, immersiōnem (“dipping”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ɪˈmɜːʃən/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ɪˈmɝʒən/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɜː(ɹ)ʒən

immersion (countable and uncountable, plural immersions)

1. The act of immersing or the condition of being immersed.
   1. The total submerging of a person in water as an act of baptism.
      • 2016, Risto Uro, Ritual and Christian Beginnings, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 98:

        Jesus did not become known as a baptizer (cf. however John 3:26 and 4:1), but we can recognize the same ritual structure in his healing practice as in John's immersion.

   2. Deep engagement in something.
      • 2016, David Waugh, Sally Neaum, Rosemary Waugh, Children's Literature in Primary Schools, page 80:

        Recognising and knowing how to understand visual imagery in relation to a narrative in picture books is primarily a matter of immersion in books within a specific culture.

2. (British, Ireland, informal) An immersion heater.
   • 2020, Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing But Blue Sky, Penguin, →ISBN:

     She left the immersion on all the time, while I had been reared under pain of death to turn it off as soon as the bathwater was heated.

3. (mathematics) A smooth map whose differential is everywhere injective, related to the mathematical concept of an embedding.
   • 2006, William F. Basener, Topology and Its Applications, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 82:

     Note that every embedding is an immersion, but the converse is not true. For an immersion to be an embedding, it must be one-to-one and the inverse must be continuous.

4. (astronomy) The disappearance of a celestial body, by passing either behind another, as in the occultation of a star, or into its shadow, as in the eclipse of a satellite.

   Antonym: emersion

   • 2009, Steven Wepster, Between Theory and Observations, Springer Science, →ISBN, page 178:

     An occultation of a star by the moon provides two sharply defined observable phenomena: the disappearance of a star behind the disc of the moon (called its immersion), and its subsequent reappearance (or emersion).

5. (education) A form of foreign-language teaching where the language is used intensively to teach other subjects to a student.
   • 2001, Mary Goebel Noguchi, Sandra Fotos, Studies in Japanese Bilingualism, Multilingual Matters, →ISBN, page 272:

     Although numerous studies have reported the effectiveness of immersion programmes in developing relatively high levels of second language proficiency without any tradeoff of first language development or subject matter mastery, little is known of immersion education in Japan.

6. One's suspension of disbelief while reading, playing a video game, etc. The experience of losing oneself in a fictional world.
7. (art) A creative relationship with one's social and ecological environment as practiced by the Brooklyn Immersionists.

• Immersion in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911)
• immersion on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “immersion”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

• semi-minor, semiminor

immersion

1. genitive singular of immersio

• seminormi

Borrowed from Late Latin immersiō, immersiōnem.

• Audio

  (file)

immersion f (plural immersions)

1. immersion
2. language immersion

• immerger
• immerseur

• “immersion”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.