Word Finder - percolating

definition

To pass a liquid through a porous substance; to filter.

definition

To drain or seep through a porous substance.

example

Water percolates through sand.

definition

To make (coffee) in a percolator.

example

I'll percolate some coffee.

definition

To spread slowly or gradually; to slowly become noticed or realised.

example

Reports on the pitiful state of many prisons have finally percolated through to the Home Office, which has promised to look into the situation.

The moisture from the clay, percolating through the mass of sugar, washes away the adhering molasses and leaves the crystals comparatively free and clear.

As water for respiration streams through the clefts, gaseous interchange takes place between the circulating colourless blood and the percolating water.

Any cracks were thus, no doubt, temporarily closed; and as the structure of the rest of the dam was porous, no opportunity was given for the percolating water to accumulate in the horizontal fissures to anything like the head in the reservoir.

Many vitreous rocks show alteration of this type in certain parts where either the glass has been of unstable nature or where agencies of change such as percolating water have had easiest access (as along joints, perlitic cracks and the margins of dikes and sills).

On some occasions, owing to the sudden melting of a surface layer of ice and snow, a large quantity of cold water, percolating rapidly, gave for a short time values of the diffusivity as high as.

The heaps are moistened with ferric chloride solution, and the reaction is maintained by the liquid percolating through the heap. The liquid is run off at the base of the heaps into the precipitating tanks, where the copper is thrown down by means of metallic iron.

Imagine for a moment that the sand grains were by any means rendered immobile without change in the permeability of their interspaces; we could then dispense with the iron or brickwork lining of the well; but as there would still be no cracks or fissures to extend the area of percolating water exposed to the open well, the yield would be very small.

Drains ordinarily remove only excess of capillary water, an excess of percolating water in wet weather.

They pass into the refrigerator, where they are condensed and fall back as a condensed liquid through the meal, percolating it as they pass downwards, and reaching to the bottom of the vessel as a more or less saturated solution of oil in the solvent.

The deposits in the great limestone caves of Kentucky, Virginia and Indiana have been probably derived from the overlying soil and accumulated by percolating water; they are of no commercial value.

In any case results deduced from the annual wave must be expected to vary in different years according to the distribution of the rainfall, as the values represent averages depending chiefly on the diffusion of heat by percolating water.

Stagnation of water is inimical to the action of the roots, and does away with the advantageous processes of flowing and percolating currents.

The engineer must not decide upon the plan till he has gauged at different seasons the stream which has to supply the water, and has ascertained the rain-collecting area available, and the rainfall of the district, as well as the proportion of storable to percolating and evaporating water.

On permeable soils, especially those of the terrace lands along the valleys, the soluble salts commonly known as alkali were gradually leached out and carried by the percolating waters towards the lower lands, where, reaching the surface, the alkali was left as a glistening crust or as pools of inky blackness.

No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers--like water percolating through sand--spread irresistibly through the city in all directions from the Kremlin into which they had first marched.