immersion

1. (British, Ireland, informal) An immersion heater.Examples: "She left the immersion on all the time, while I had been reared under pain of death to turn it off as soon as the bathwater was heated."BritishIrelandcountableinformaluncountable

2. (mathematics) A smooth map whose differential is everywhere injective, related to the mathematical concept of an embedding.Examples: "Note that every embedding is an immersion, but the converse is not true. For an immersion to be an embedding, it must be one-to-one and the inverse must be continuous."countableuncountable

3. (astronomy) The disappearance of a celestial body, by passing either behind another, as in the occultation of a star, or into its shadow, as in the eclipse of a satellite.Examples: "An occultation of a star by the moon provides two sharply defined observable phenomena: the disappearance of a star behind the disc of the moon (called its immersion), and its subsequent reappearance (or emersion)."Antonyms: emersioncountableuncountable

4. (education) A form of foreign-language teaching where the language is used intensively to teach other subjects to a student.Examples: "Although numerous studies have reported the effectiveness of immersion programmes in developing relatively high levels of second language proficiency without any tradeoff of first language development or subject matter mastery, little is known of immersion education in Japan."countableuncountable

5. (art) A creative relationship with one's social and ecological environment as practiced by the Brooklyn Immersionists.countableuncountable