incidence
/ˈɪnsɪd(ə)ns
/noun
1The occurrence, rate, or frequency of a disease, crime, or other undesirable thing: an increased incidence of cancer...
- Trees can help reduce the incidence of respiratory diseases as well as lung cancer.
- Panchayats should take the initiative to reduce the incidence of the disease at grass-root levels.
- There are different skull shapes, different frequencies of blood types, different incidences of heritable diseases.
Synonyms
occurrence, prevalence, commonness;
rate, frequency;
amount, degree, quantity, extent
1.1The way in which the burden of a tax falls upon the population: the entire incidence falls on the workers...
- For example, he treated the incidences of taxes on capital and land in lieu of examining the effects of a property tax per se.
- Tax incidence is clearly an important issue - where does the burden really fall?
- In practice, the eventual receipts of any party will be reduced by the incidence of income tax.
2 [mass noun] Physics The intersection of a line, or something moving in a straight line, such as a beam of light, with a surface: the point of incidence of the beam...
- Due to the glancing incidence of the ion beam, argon is not implanted into the sample surface.
- With grazing incidence diffraction a monoclinic tilted chain lattice is found in the condensed phase.
- The optical output to which a given beam travels depends on the beam's respective direction of incidence.
Origin
Late Middle English (denoting a casual or subordinate event): from Old French, or from medieval Latin incidentia, from Latin incidere 'fall upon, happen to' (see incident). sense 1 dates from the early 19th century.