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penetration

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pɛ.nɪˈtɹeɪ.ʃən//
  • United States//pɛ.nəˈtɹeɪ.ʃən//

The act of penetrating something.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of penetrating something.

  2. 2

    The insertion of the penis (or similar object) during sexual intercourse.

    Any penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.

  3. 3

    The act of penetrating a given situation with the mind or faculties; perception, discernment.

    […] my observations of her looks and actions became acutely sharpened, and that to a degree, which, notwithstanding my efforts to conceal it, could not escape her penetration.

    I have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane.

  4. 4

    The act of progressing or moving forward through or into something.

    Arsenal lacked urgency and penetration in a lazy, lacklustre opening half, sucked in by Forest's strategy of sitting back in blocks of defence waiting to hit them on the counter.

  5. 5

    A number or fraction that represents how many cards/decks will be dealt before shuffling, in contrast to the total number of cards/decks in play.

  6. 6

    The proportion of the target audience who buy or use the specified product or service.

    The electrification of the lines radiating from Casablanca originated with the policy of economic penetration and conciliation pursued by Marshal Lyautey for the pacification of Morocco.

Etymology

From Middle English penetracioun, from Old French penetracïon, and its source, Latin penetrātiō, from the participle stem of penetrō (“pierce”, verb). Morphologically penetrate + -ion.

Forms

plural
penetrations
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).