Quantisations

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The process of discretizing a continuous quantity into distinct values or levels
2. The act of transforming a continuous physical property into a series of finite states
3. A method of approximating continuous systems by quantifying their components into specified discrete units

Etymology: "Quantisations" is simply the plural of "quantisation," the act or process of turning something continuous into discrete, countable steps. The core of the word is "quantise," itself formed from "quantum," the Latin word for "how much" or "amount," which physicists borrowed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to describe indivisible packets of energy. The ending does most of the grammatical work. The suffix "-ation" passed into English through Old French from Latin "-ātiō," a noun-forming ending that turns a verb into the name of the action it describes. So "quantise" plus "-ation" gives the name of the process, and the plural "-s" counts how many separate instances of that process one is discussing.