: to cause to move in a wavy, sinuous, or flowing manner
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Make Waves With the History of Undulate
Undulate and inundate are word cousins that branch from unda, the Latin word for "wave." No surprise there. But would you have guessed that abound, surround, and redound are also unda offspring? The connection between unda and these words is easier to see when you learn that at some point in their early histories each of them essentially had the meaning of "to overflow"—a meaning that inundate still carries, along with its "overwhelm" sense.
These fluffy boa-type feathers undulate beautifully in the water and make your fly look alive. Aleta Burchyski, Outside Online, 20 May 2020 Dots undulate, bubble up, then dissolve into the depths below my cellphone screen.New York Times, 29 Mar. 2022 For miles, the soft green slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains undulate, fading into a honeyed patchwork of farmland and forest that kiss the horizon.Washington Post, 26 Feb. 2022 Thousands of variously sized glass marbles, arranged on a dark, round mat, seem to undulate like boiling water, or maybe spacetime in a black hole. Laura Hudson, Wired, 16 Nov. 2021 Two weeks ago, as the landslide hit unprecedented speed, causing the ground around it to undulate with each passing truck, the team conceded defeat and closed the back half of the park weeks earlier than anticipated.Time, 7 Sep. 2021 Visitors tour through a history of the 19th-century painter's famously dramatic life and are surrounded by more then 300 of his paintings and sketches, which animate and undulate and drift around on all sides. Duante Beddingfield, Detroit Free Press, 27 July 2021 Their five-centimeter-thick quadruped was able to crawl and undulate its way through a space just two centimeters high. Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American, 30 Nov. 2011 Blades of strikingly green grass undulate in the currents. Shane Gross; Text By Katherine Harmon Courage, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Nov. 2020 See More
Word History
Etymology
Adjective
Latin undulatus, from *undula, diminutive of unda wave — more at water