migrate
/mʌɪˈɡreɪt
/ /ˈmʌɪɡreɪt /verb [no object]
1(Of an animal, typically a bird or fish) move from one region or habitat to another according to the seasons: as autumn arrives, the birds migrate south...
- In eastern North America, over two-thirds of breeding bird species migrate.
- Magnetic cues, which help many bird species migrate, appear to be particularly important to Bobolinks.
- In the fall, Bermuda is a rest stop for birds migrating from Canada to South America.
Synonyms
roam, wander, drift, rove, travel (around), voyage, journey, trek, hike, itinerate, globetrot
1.1(Of a person) move to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions: rural populations have migrated to urban areas...
- Most of the farmers migrated to the area in the 1970s, following the paths opened by oil companies.
- Their women, who did not bind their feet, worked beside them in the fields and often tended the farms while their husbands migrated to the mines or to man ships, burn charcoal, or emigrate.
- Many villages in the regency are devoid of young people as they have all migrated to Medan, Jakarta, Surabaya and other urban areas due to a lack of jobs at home.
2Move from one part of something to another: cells which can form pigment migrate beneath the skin...
- This prevents the chromophore from migrating within the polymer while simultaneously improving the efficiency of energy transfer to the chromophore.
- However, the efficiency of this process is low because the positive charge from the guanine radical cation also migrates to the solvent.
- When an electric current is passed through this molten mixture, the aluminum ions migrate to the cathode, where they are reduced to metal.
2.1(With reference to computer users) change or cause to change from one system to another: [no object]: customers are migrating from mainframes to client-server environments [with object]: save time by efficiently migrating data to secondary storage systems...
- After all, StarOffice is free, and is more about getting computer users to migrate from Windows than anything else.
- Stalker realizes many users will be migrating from another system, such as an IMAP or POP server.
- When TMC went out of business, users had to migrate to different systems that had less sophisticated software as well as different hardware architecture.
2.2 [with object] Computing Transfer (programs or hardware) from one system to another: the system will allow users to migrate applications across environments...
- The market seems to approve: handset manufacturers including Nokia, Sendo and Sony Ericsson have said they will migrate their signing programs to Symbian Signed.
- Smaller software vendors in particular said they were unable to migrate applications to Linux, simply because they lack open source knowledge.
- And lo and behold, Oracle has a major U2 software house migrating all of its applications to Oracle.
Derivatives
migrator
/ /ˈmʌɪˌɡreɪtə / noun ...- Below normal precipitation in 2002 and the resulting shift in available water and herbage has created some concern among conservationists for migrators, such as the Sandhill cranes shown here.
- Interviews suggest that the fullest migrators tend to be long-time Windows developers with a need to keep up with all of the latest bells-and-whistles.
- They are vertical daily migrators, following plankton populations.
Origin
Early 17th century (in the general sense 'move from one place to another'): from Latin migrat- 'moved, shifted', from the verb migrare.
The word migrate was initially a general word for ‘move from one place to another’. It comes from Latin migrare ‘to move, shift’. People could immigrate from the early 17th century, but emigrants only appeared in the mid 18th century.