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Allin

reflection

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ɹɪˈflɛkʃən//

The act of reflecting or the state of being reflected.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of reflecting or the state of being reflected.

  2. 2

    The property of a propagated wave being thrown back from a surface (such as a mirror).

  3. 3

    Something, such as an image, that is reflected.

    The dog barked at his own reflection in the mirror.

    A body of black that carried no reflection.

  4. 4

    Careful thought or consideration.

    After careful reflection, I have decided not to vote for that proposition.

    But Richmond, his grandfather's darling, after one thoughtful glance cast under his lashes at that uncompromising countenance appeared to lose himself in his own reflections.

  5. 5

    A representative manifestation or outcome of a condition, trend or trait.

    Our recent results are a reflection of the progress we've made as a team.

    Zuckerberg said last month that the name change was a reflection of how much Facebook had evolved.

  6. 6

    A representative manifestation or outcome of a condition, trend or trait. Used to make an implied criticism.

    It is a reflection on his character that he never came back to see them.

  7. 7

    The process or mechanism of determining the capabilities of an object at run-time.

    DynamicMBeanFacade uses Java's reflection API to introspect the managed resource and discover data type information for attributes.

  8. 8

    The folding of a part; a fold.

Etymology

From Middle English refleccion, refleccioun, refleccioune, reflection, from Middle French reflection, reflexion, and its source Late Latin reflexiō, from the participle stem of reflectō. The current spelling is influenced by reflect. Equivalent to reflect + -ion.

Forms

plural
reflections
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).