interference

Meaning

Noun

• The act of interfering with something, or something that interferes.
• The illegal obstruction of an opponent in some ball games.
• An effect caused by the superposition of two systems of waves.
• A distortion on a broadcast signal due to atmospheric or other effects.
• In United States patent law, an inter partes proceeding to determine the priority issues of multiple patent applications; a priority contest.
• The interruption of the line between an attacked piece and its defender by sacrificially interposing a piece.
• The situation where a person who knows two languages inappropriately transfers lexical items or structures from one to the other.

Related

Opposite words

• noninterference

Origin

• From interfere + -ence. The sense in physics was likely introduced by , which he used as early as 1801 in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.