| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| fission |
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| SYLLABICATION: | fis·sion |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  f sh  n |
| NOUN: | 1. The act or process of splitting into parts. 2. A nuclear reaction in which an atomic nucleus, especially a heavy nucleus such as an isotope of uranium, splits into fragments, usually two fragments of comparable mass, releasing from 100 million to several hundred million electron volts of energy. 3. Biology An asexual reproductive process in which a unicellular organism divides into two or more independently maturing daughter cells. | | VERB: | Inflected forms: fis·sioned, fis·sion·ing, fis·sions
| | TRANSITIVE VERB: | To cause (an atom) to undergo fission. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | To undergo fission. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Latin fissi , fissin-, a cleaving, from fissus, split. See fissi–.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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