- 1板塊構造的、地殼運動的;tectonic plates 就是「板塊」,plate tectonics 是「板塊構造學說」;比喻用法 a tectonic shift 指「翻天覆地的變化」
In geology, 'tectonic' describes the huge slow movements of the great plates that make up the surface of the Earth. You meet it most in the fixed phrases 'tectonic plates' and 'plate tectonics' (the whole theory, treated as a singular subject: 'plate tectonics is taught in junior high'). 'Tectonic activity' or 'tectonic movement' is what causes earthquakes and builds mountains — something Taiwan knows well, sitting where two plates press together. Outside science, the word has a second life in the phrase 'a tectonic shift', used about , business, or society to mean a change so deep and so large that everything above it must move too — the ground itself has changed, not just the weather. Writers like it because it suggests something slow, enormous, and impossible to stop. That figurative use is common in newspapers and speeches, and there it often gets stretched to mean simply 'very big', which is looser than the picture the word really paints. A much older, rarer sense means 'to do with building or construction', which is where the word actually started.
From the word’s history
From Late Latin tectonicus, from Greek tektonikos 'of building', from tekton 'carpenter'; geology sense from 1894.
源自希臘文 tektōn「木匠」，原指建造，1894 年起用於地質。
組成From Ancient Greek tekton, a carpenter or builder, through tektonikos, 'to do with building', plus the ending -ic, 'having to do with'. So the first meaning was about construction; geologists borrowed it in the 1890s for the way the Earth's crust is built and rebuilt.
同家族的字
- architectcontains the same Greek tekton, builder — an architect is the 'chief builder'
- texturefrom the same older root meaning 'to make or weave'
- technologyfrom Greek tekhne, skill in making, from the same root as tekton
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
tectonicadj
- 1
Of or relating to construction or to architecture.
- 2
biologynatural-sciencesStructural.
- 3
geographygeologynatural-sciencesOf, relating to, or caused by large-scale movements of the Earth's (or a similar planet's) lithosphere.
- A boiling hot rock planet with extreme tectonic activity, Parnassus is home to many volcanic mountains. Surface scans reveal several geothermal and solar power stations, tapping the planet's abundant energy.
- At some point, Venus may have had its own form of plate tectonics – possibly different from the plate tectonics here on Earth. Water and rock measurements obtained from the DAVINCI mission, combined with the Venus global mapping information by NASA’s VERITAS mission, another recently selected mission to Venus that is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, can be used to decipher how these tectonic patterns may have operated on Venus, and why the planet was unable to sustain them in a fashion similar to Earth.
- 4
Momentous, utter, vast.
- But it would be a mistake to imagine that we are benignly coming full circle, or even that we are finding that the old ways are still the most efficient. A tectonic shift has occurred.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。