continuouscon‧tin‧u‧ous /kənˈtɪnjuəs/ ●●○ S3 W3 adjective 
continuous economic growth a continuous flow of information2something such as a line that is continuous does not have any spaces or holes in it OPP broken3continuous assessment British English a way of judging a student’s ability by looking at the work they have done during the year rather than by an examination4 technical the continuous form of a verb shows that an action is continuing. In English, this is formed by the verb ‘be’, followed by a present participle, as in ‘I was waiting for the bus.’—continuously adverb: UMNO had ruled Malaysia continuously since independence.
WORD ORIGINcontinuous
Origin:
1600-1700 Latin continuus, from continere; ➔ CONTAINEXAMPLES FROM OTHER DICTIONARIES
- continuous news coverage
- a continuous improvement in customer service
- a continuous trail along the ridge
- Although we nearly always need extra drivers, we cannot guarantee continuous employment.
- CNN provided continuous coverage of the trial.
- The campsites have had three decades of continuous use.
- Classical elasticity assumes this to be the case and it has been very successful with continuous media.
- Executive Programmes cater for mainly company sponsored participants who attend residential programmes on a continuous or modular basis.
- Some are comprehensive and cover short-term exports on a continuous basis, others are tailored for specific contracts.
- The curd is cut, stirred, and heated with continuous stirring to separate curd and whey.
- The monotonous sound of the train was an invitation to float, the engine emitting smooth, continuous snorts and sneezes.
- The most interesting of Parnas's points was that there are two kinds of complex systems: continuous, and discontinuous.
- There was also an overall speeding up of things because of the continuous nature of automatic control.
- Ultimately systems should be designed with user involvement at every stage, on a continuous and evolutionary basis.
THESAURUS
continuing for a long time without stopping, or happening many times in a way that is annoying or causes problems: · There has been a continual improvement in standards.· There were continual interruptions all day.· The couple were having continual arguments and they decided that the best thing to do was to split up.
continuing without stopping: · a continuous process of change· I've had six continuous hours of meetings.· The machines have remained in continuous service over the last six years without any problem.
used when saying that something does not stop or always stays the same, or that something keeps happening. Constant is often used about things that are worrying, frightening, or difficult: · There is a constant stream of water coming out of the ground.· The plane was traveling at a constant speed of 650 kilometres an hour.· The refugees live in constant fear of attack.· There is always the constant threat of war.· His illness makes life a constant struggle for him and his parents.· The photographs are a constant reminder (=something that makes you keep remembering something) of what happened in Bosnia.
[only before noun] continuing for a long time without anything stopping it – used especially when it is important for something to continue: · Women with small babies seldom get more than two or three hours of uninterrupted sleep.· The nation has enjoyed nine years of uninterrupted economic growth.· The system helps to maintain an uninterrupted flow of traffic.· an uninterrupted view of the mountains
adjective, adverb continuing for a long time without stopping – used especially about rain, journeys, work, or entertainment: · two days of nonstop rain· a nonstop flight to Tokyo· The concert will be seven hours of non-stop entertainment.· They worked non-stop.
if work or a situation is on-going, it will continue into the future, though there will be pauses in it: · The police said the investigation is on-going.· ongoing negotiations
[only before noun] used when emphasizing that you do something all through a period of time, with no breaks at all: · After eight solid hours of driving, I was exhausted.· It took two solid weeks of work to fix the tunnel.
Longman Language Activatorcontinuing for a long time continuing for a long time without stopping: · Although we nearly always need extra drivers, we cannot guarantee continuous employment.· CNN provided continuous coverage of the trial.· The campsites have had three decades of continuous use.
continuous and seeming to be there all the time: · He suffered constant pain in the months before his death.· A newborn baby needs constant care and attention.· The refugees lived in constant fear of being attacked.
something good or pleasant such as peace or sleep that is uninterrupted continues for a long time with no interruptions: · On average, two-year-old children need ten to twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep a night.· Banks need uninterrupted, 24-hour computer systems.
an on-going activity, situation, or piece of work is not intended to end at a definite time, but will continue into the future: · The police refused to comment on the on-going investigation.· We have a major on-going research programme into North Sea pollution.
continuing without stopping: · She's been driving non-stop for hours.· Make sure he does some homework -- he'll watch TV non-stop if you let him.
without stopping for a rest: · Victor talked for forty minutes without a break.· On average, the human mind cannot concentrate on spoken information for more than six minutes without a break.
if something unpleasant or unusual continues for hours, days, miles etc on end , it continues for that time, distance without stopping: · The rain had been falling for days on end.· In Siberia the temperature can stay more than twenty below freezing for months on end.
if someone works or does something for ten hours, three days etc at a stretch , they do it for that time without stopping, although this may be difficult or unusual: · A lion can lie on the same spot, without moving, for twelve hours at a stretch.· Doctors who are forced to work 36 hours at a stretch cannot possibly be fully efficient.
if you do something for two solid hours, three solid weeks etc you do it continuously for that period with no breaks at all: · After eight solid hours of driving, I was exhausted.· Nobody really wants to sit through four solid hours of someone else's wedding video.
every day, every week etc for a long time: · The fighting went on week after week and there seemed no end to it.· She sits at home day after day, waiting for a message from her husband.
if something happens day in, day out , it happens every day and is always the same, with the result that it becomes very boring: · Working in a factory involves the same routine day in, day out.· He wears an old brown jacket day in, day out.
WORD SETSabbr., abbreviate, verbabbreviation, nounabstract noun, nounaccusative, nounactive, adjectiveadj., adjective, nounadv., adverb, nounadverbial, adjectiveaffix, nounantecedent, nounapposition, nounarticle, nounaspect, nounattributive, adjectiveaux., auxiliary, nounauxiliary verb, nouncase, nouncausal, adjectiveclause, nouncollective noun, nouncommon noun, nouncomparative, adjectivecomparison, nouncomplement, nouncomplex, adjectivecompound, nounconcord, nounconcrete noun, nounconditional, adjectiveconditional, nounconj., conjugate, verbconjugation, nounconjunction, nounconnective, nounconstruction, nouncontinuous, adjectivecontraction, nouncoordinate, adjectivecoordinating conjunction, nouncopula, nouncountable, adjectivecount noun, noundative, noundeclension, noundefinite article, noundemonstrative, adjectivedemonstrative pronoun, noundependent clause, noundeterminer, noundirect discourse, noundirect object, noundirect speech, noundisjunctive, adjectiveditransitive, adjectivedouble negative, noun-ed, suffixending, noun-est, suffix-eth, suffixfeminine, adjectivefinite, adjectiveform, nounfunction word, nounfuture, adjectivegender, noungenitive, noungerund, noungradable, adjectivegrammar, noungrammarian, noungrammatical, adjectivehistoric present, nounhomonym, nounhomophone, nounimperative, adjectiveimperative, nounimpersonal, adjectiveindefinite article, nounindependent clause, nounindicative, nounindicative, adjectiveindirect discourse, nounindirect object, nounindirect speech, nouninfinitive, nouninflect, verbinflected, adjectiveinflection, noun-ing, suffixintensifier, nouninterjection, nouninterrogative, adjectiveinterrogative, nounintransitive, adjectivelinking verb, nounmain clause, nounmasculine, adjectivemodal, nounmodal auxiliary, nounmodal verb, nounmodifier, nounmodify, verbmood, nounn., neuter, adjectivenominal, adjectivenominative, nounnon-finite, adjectivenon-restrictive, adjectivenoun, nounnumber, nounobject, nounparse, verbparticipial, adjectiveparticiple, nounparticle, nounpartitive, nounpart of speech, nounpassive, adjectivepassivize, verbpast, adjectivepast participle, nounpast perfect, nounperfect participle, nounperiphrasis, nounpersonal pronoun, nounphrasal verb, nounphrase, nounpl., plural, nounplural, adjectiveplurality, nounpossessive, adjectivepossessive, nounpredeterminer, nounpredicate, nounpredicative, adjectiveprefix, nounprefix, verbprep., preposition, nounprepositional phrase, nounpres., present participle, nounprogressive, adjectivepronominal, adjectivepronoun, nounproper noun, nounpunctuate, verbpunctuation, nounqualifier, nounquantifier, nounquestion tag, nounreflexive, adjectiveregular, adjectiverelative clause, nounrelative pronoun, nounreported speech, nounrestrictive clause, nounroot, nounrule, nounrun-on sentence, nounsecond person, nounsemicolon, nounsentence, nounsentence adverb, nounsingular, adjectivesolecism, nounsplit infinitive, nounstative, adjectivestem, nounsubject, nounsubjective, adjectivesubjunctive, nounsubordinate clause, nounsubstantive, nounsuffix, nounsuperlative, adjectivesyntactic, adjectivesyntax, nountag, nountense, nountransitive, adjectiveuncountable, adjectivev., variant, nounverb, nounverbal, adjectivevocative, noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM THE ENTRY a continuous flow of informationCOLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a continuous flow of information (=working all the time, without any periods being unemployed)· You can join the pension scheme after two years of continuous employment with the company.
· The social system is undergoing continuous evolution to adapt to these rapid changes.
(=happening slowly and gradually)· The following two seasons saw a steady improvement in the team's performance.
COLLOCATIONS FROM THE CORPUSADVERB· During the next seventeen years Normand presided over massive and almost continuous expansion.· These papillae form an almost continuous series with 4 or 5 similar papillae associated with the second oral tentacle pore.· Dandelions are divided into thousands of distinct kinds, fitted to where they live and blended into an almost continuous series.· From now on there was almost continuous warfare between them and the kings of Shoa.· One is the accelerating rate of development in technological fields, which enforces almost continuous changes in products and processes.· But from 1555 to 1602 there was almost continuous dispute.· I spent what I assume was transition with an almost continuous pain in my left side and feeling sick as well.
· Etiquette requires more or less continuous competition among diners to keep one another's tea-cups topped up.· Present and past were less continuous than synonymous.· If the explosive activity is more or less continuous, then clearly ash will rise continuously.· Indeed, increasing concern over inflation led to the operation of more or less continuous incomes policies during the 1970s.
NOUN· B.Eds were about equally divided between continuous assessment and examinations, with some project work.· Student performance will be judged on the basis of degree examination results, thesis and continuous assessment, following current University regulations.· Against this, they will be making continuous assessments of the scale of current bank lending.· On none of these courses was there any examination: continuous assessment was preferred.· Many of our courses include a project in the continuous assessment element.· The intrinsic discipline of the subject is conveyed through the course-work and teaching approach, while being monitored through continuous assessment.· People only accumulate competencies by continuous assessment of skills they do in their day to day job.· Student progress is monitored by means of continuous assessment on a range of practical exercises.
· Financial information Information of a financial type is kept up-to-date by five of the six departments on a continuous basis.· In this sense, the use of float is automatically optimized on a continuous basis.· However, it will be unlikely that you could produce enough to satisfy the appetites of the Tangs on a continuous basis.· Some are comprehensive and cover short-term exports on a continuous basis, others are tailored for specific contracts.· But Mr Milburn warned that the Government would not be making resources available on a continuous basis to cut waiting lists.· Effective promotional activity may then leave the retailer with little choice but to stock the brand on a continuous basis.· A number of products or components are made at the same time, but not on a continuous basis.
· Formally, this could mean that there is continuous change, the music varying just as the words do.· The world is full of continuous change, however, and predictive networks will need to handle time-varying data.· The results may be mediocre, because continuous change results in lack of memorability.· So how do you enhance your capacity to deal effectively with continuous change?· The great thing about differential equations is that they produce nice smoothly continuous change in the quantities they describe.· One is the accelerating rate of development in technological fields, which enforces almost continuous changes in products and processes.
· Foucault objects to historicism and Western humanism to the extent that they assume a continuous development, progress, and global totalization.· The following characteristics of preoperational thought are necessary for continuous development.· But the point is that once started, it is often a continuous development until one or both parties become losers.
· Maternity leave does not break one's period of continuous employment and indeed it counts as part of that period.· The continuous employment of proper symbols frees man to participate actively and fully in the dynamic totality of creation.· Commonly geared to the demands of a constricted local market, not all these crafts could provide continuous employment.· An employee needs to show that he has been in two years continuous employment.· Redundancy An employee will not be eligible for a redundancy payment unless he has had two years' continuous employment.
· Separation of the components on or in the stationary phase by a continuous flow of the mobile phase.· In continuous flow analyzers, all Specimens flow through the Same tubing.· We hoped for a continuous flow of information and exchange of art and culture between the two countries.· Hence, carry-over or cross-contamination can occur in continuous flow analyzers if suitable precautions are not taken.· The run-on lines create a continuous flow capturing the rush of Bedivere.· From the holding silo grain passes over the continuous flow drier and any overflow travels back to the holding silos.
· This policy halted the previously continuous growth of local authority tenancies and contributed to the overall increase in owner occupancy.
· Learning from experience is a recipe for continuous improvement.· In Workplace 2000, every company will need world-class performance and continuous improvement to be successful.· Known as Ford Q1, the programme provides a formal system for implementing continuous improvement methods which is recognised and accepted worldwide.· By contrast, total quality and continuous improvement concern themselves with improving performance in smaller chunks.· Finally, there needs to be a commitment to continuous improvement through development.· For a market economy to work, the population must be made to believe that it is in need of continuous improvement.· An organisational commitment to continuous improvement of the skills of members 5.· Establish measurement means to feed continuous improvement.
· They'd be going in one continuous line through the streets.· The location of the perimeter of a square can be described by continuous lines.· The continuous lines then come straight out from the pole and are pegged to the ground forming a triangle shape.· The continuous line shows what the retailer hopes to sell this year.· A row of closely spaced dots will look like a continuous line.
· The tape is said to run in a continuous loop, a method of speeding up access time to data.· Ink ribbons for dot-matrix printers are made in the form of a continuous loop.· And the continuous loops put an end to tangled cords.
· All patients had continuous monitoring of arterial pressure and urine output.· This in conjunction with previous research would provide a continuous monitoring of the industry from the early sixties.· Measurement of sodium concentrations is simple to perform and offers the possibility of prolonged continuous monitoring.· The slow kinetics of antigen-antibody dissociation, unfortunately, precludes using antibodies in reversible sensors for continuous monitoring.· Both systems offer continuous monitoring of alarm modules with data-logging and full communication between the system and the host computer.· Another 23% did not make duty periods overlap to ensure continuous monitoring.· They do not just generate data but enter into collaboration in the continuous monitoring of classroom activity and its effects.
· Of course professional use is significantly more, but even than the actual period of continuous operation is deceptively low.· Depending on use, these will last for between 60 and 90 minutes of continuous operation.· This ensures cool and stable operation during continuous operation.
· Desertion Your wife has left you for a continuous period of two years.· That the respondent has deserted the petitioner for a continuous period of at least two years immediately preceding the presentation of the petition.
· Thus it ensures a continuous process of review covering all permissions.· Revelation is a continuous process, confined to no one group and to no one age.· By contrast coaching is a continuous process which may be incorporated into both counselling and appraisal sessions.· Cognitive development, though a continuous process, can be divided into four stages for purposes of analysis and description.· In the continuous process thus engendered one sees how true theory stimulates ideas about what may be, in realms as yet unexplored.· As said previously, the socialization of behavior is a continuous process that begins in early childhood with simple imitations.· New industrial methods based on assembly lines and continuous processes were typically more dependent on electricity than the ones they replaced.· Piaget conceptualized development as a continuous process along a continuum.
· These papillae form an almost continuous series with 4 or 5 similar papillae associated with the second oral tentacle pore.· And 6 percent is better than 5, 7 percent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continuous series.· Dandelions are divided into thousands of distinct kinds, fitted to where they live and blended into an almost continuous series.· They may form a continuous series with the oral papillae as in the genus Ophiopristis.· From here, there is a continuous series of gradations to gliding wings, and hence to flapping wings.· There are two distal oral papillae on each side of the jaw forming a continuous series with the infradental papillae.· The distal papillae appear to form a continuous series with the superficial tentacle scales of the second oral tentacle pore.· The oral papillae form a continuous series, there are no significant gaps between the papillae.
· Perhaps continuous service as Leader of the Opposition would do.· Payments are calculated on the basis of the worker's age, length of continuous service, and pay.· The ferry was finally closed in 1964 after 600 years of continuous service apart from the short wartime break referred to.· Only employees with two or more years' continuous service qualify for unfair dismissal rights.
· Moreover, when words are spoken in continuous speech they often sound different from when spoken in isolation.· Areas such as vision, continuous speech recognition and synthesis, and machine learning have been hard.· The paper does not specify how a decision can be made about a word's identity during continuous speech.· Possible applications are continuous speech recognition and commands to robot arms.
· This behaviour is really a continuous stream of behaviours.· And it organises a continuous stream of philosophical conferences.· Don't just write a continuous stream of unorganised information.· Mr Daubney had been busy with a continuous stream of traffic.· The sisters had no money for food and medicines, but they received a continuous stream of charitable donations.· The frequency of occurrence of each n-gram in a continuous stream of data constitutes the n-gram statistics of the data set.
· Your new Thames Water charges still represent exceedingly good value for a continuous supply of water and our sewage services.· Therefore, a continuous supply of newly fallen ancients is needed to maintain the long-term health and balanced composition of the forest.· However, an accountant's professional work does not always amount to a continuous supply of services.· One-off assignments, such as many bankruptcies, project evaluations and adhoc consultancy, are in fact often not continuous supplies of services.
· The relatively continuous use of standard system outputs to determine the necessity for corrective action.· Suissa said the increased risk was 26 percent, even after a year of continuous use.· The main purpose of these pads is to give the water a final polish and continuous use is not really obligatory.· Most hypnotics appear to lose their sleep-promoting properties within three to fourteen days of continuous use.· The material is in continuous use in the business. 3.· A medical quality quartz tube surrounds the U/V tube which has a 5,000 hour continuous use life.· We reserve the right to disconnect you after two hours continuous use and/or 10 minutes of inactivity during connection.· A single charging of the batteries allows about 2.5 hours of continuous use.
· The random haemoglobin A 1 value was a continuous variable, which was shown in a histogram to be approximately normally distributed.· Laminin was the continuous variable for most statistical tests.· Pearsons correlation coefficient was calculated to measure the association between continuous variables.· Such continuous variables foster continuous and gradual evolution.· Now, the thing about area is that it is a continuous variable.· Birth weight and gestational age were included as continuous variables.· The continuous variables knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about smoking were assessed on five scales.· For continuous variables medians were used because the results lacked normal distribution.
PHRASES FROM THE ENTRY
- Against this, they will be making continuous assessments of the scale of current bank lending.
- B.Eds were about equally divided between continuous assessment and examinations, with some project work.
- Many of our courses include a project in the continuous assessment element.
- On none of these courses was there any examination: continuous assessment was preferred.
- People only accumulate competencies by continuous assessment of skills they do in their day to day job.
- Student performance will be judged on the basis of degree examination results, thesis and continuous assessment, following current University regulations.
- Student progress is monitored by means of continuous assessment on a range of practical exercises.
- The intrinsic discipline of the subject is conveyed through the course-work and teaching approach, while being monitored through continuous assessment.
WORD FAMILYadjectivecontinualcontinued ≠ discontinuedcontinuous ≠ discontinuousnouncontinuation ≠ discontinuationcontinuity ≠ discontinuityadverbcontinuallycontinuouslyverbcontinue ≠ discontinue
1continuing to happen or exist without stopping: continuous economic growth a continuous flow of information2something such as a line that is continuous does not have any spaces or holes in it OPP broken3continuous assessment British English a way of judging a student’s ability by looking at the work they have done during the year rather than by an examination4 technical the continuous form of a verb shows that an action is continuing. In English, this is formed by the verb ‘be’, followed by a present participle, as in ‘I was waiting for the bus.’—continuously adverb: UMNO had ruled Malaysia continuously since independence.