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Definition of "capacity" []

  • The ability to receive, hold, or absorb. (noun)
  • A measure of this ability; volume. (noun)
  • The maximum amount that can be contained: a trunk filled to capacity. (noun)
  • Ability to perform or produce; capability. (noun)
  • The maximum or optimum amount that can be produced: factories operating below capacity. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "capacity" in a sentence
  • "All those things are time-binding phenomena produced by the time-binding capacity of man; but man has _not_ known that _this capacity_ was his"
  • "I have not, perhaps, in the course of the lecture, insisted enough on the nature of relative capacity and individual character, as the roots of all real _value_ in Art. We are too much in the habit, in these days, of acting as if Art.worth a price in the market were a commodity which people could be generally taught to produce, and as if the _education_ of the artist, not his _capacity_, gave the sterling value to his work."
  • "Yet notwithstanding these circumstances, so favourable to the exclusion of error, the result is a higher specific inductive capacity for sulphur than for any other body as yet tried; and though this may in part be clue to the sulphur being in a better shape, i.e. filling up more completely the space _o, o_, (fig. 104.) than the cups of shell-lac and glass, still I feel satisfied that the experiments altogether fully prove the existence of a difference between dielectrics as to their power of favouring an inductive action through them; which difference may, for the present, be expressed by the term _specific inductive capacity_."