Scrambling

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The act of mixing or jumbling items into a disordered state ; moving in a hurried and uncoordinated way, often climbing or rushing ; the process of converting data into a coded form to protect it
2. Rearranging parts to create confusion or disorder ; hurrying or clambering in a rough or unorganized fashion ; encoding messages or signals to secure their contents from interception
3. Combining elements randomly or confusingly ; quickly moving or climbing with difficulty ; transforming information by encryption to conceal its meaning

Etymology: The sense most people meet first, a rough, clambering rush, is the older one, but the word's most recent meaning was invented by a linguist. In 1967, American linguist John R. Ross coined the term "scrambling" for a grammatical operation in which the elements of a sentence can be reordered, as in moving a phrase to the front of a clause, without changing its basic meaning. He gave it a name borrowed from the everyday English verb, which already described jumbling things out of their usual order. The everyday sense is far older. "Scramble" is widely thought to be of uncertain origin, and the verb's sense of hurrying hastily on hands and feet is what the word meant long before anyone applied it to sentences. Ross's technical use took that core idea of disordering something and applied it to word order, which is why the linguistic meaning feels so close to the familiar one.

Synonyms: clambering, hastening, scurrying, scuttling, traversing

Antonyms: calm, relaxing, strolling, sauntering, loitering