ortholinear

English

An ortholinear keyboard. Rather than staggering the keys horizontally, they line up in parallel columns.

Etymology

From ortho- +‎ linear.

Adjective

ortholinear (not comparable)

1. (computing, of a keyboard) Having keys that are aligned in a perfect grid.
2. Having all turns occurring at right angles.
   • 1967, Karl Hruby, Adolph Posner, Slitlamp Examination of Vitreous and Retina, page 30:

     In the human fetus as well as in the eye of the infant a delicate ortholinear central canal was similarly in evidence; however, the canal could not be demonstrated in the eye of adult humans.

   • 1971, Excerpta Medica: Pediatrics - Volume 25, page 341:

     The course of the fistula was ortholinear and caudally directed.

   • 1979, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Annual Report, Director of Medical Research, page 162:

     When monocytes are placed in a gradient of formyl-methiornyl-leucyl-phenalanine (FMLP), their velocity increased two to threefold, the percent of observation time spent remaining stationary decreased to 5% and locomotion was much more ortholinear.

   • 2001, George L. Hersey, The Monumental Impulse: Architecture's Biological Roots, page 14:

     When a crystal formation involves a cell that is similar but angled within its cage, the Bravais lattic projects the angled cell from well-defined points in an outlying ortholinear grid, as in the illustration.

   • 2012, Robert J. Lang, Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an Ancient Art, page 453:

     Each object—square, rectangle, or ortholinear river—receives a particular pattern of mountain and valley creases, as shown in Figure 12.38.

3. Forming a line when plotted on a set of orthogonal axes.
   • 1964, Abraham Aaron Roback, History of American Psychology, page 460:

     Then it must be borne in mind that Binet's original scale was in terms of years and months, but it yielded no ortholinear values so that score differences could be seen at a glance for the purpose of comparison.

   • 1967, Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, page 65:

     As is known in seismology , the magnitude frequency relation of earthquakes is ortholinear on a bilogarithmical scale and is characterized by the angle coefficient y.

   • 1978, Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports, page 1646:

     Nomography is the art or science of constructing graphs that enable a dependent variable to be determined by the use of ortholinear projections given the values of one or more independent variables.

   • 2012, Salvatore Greco, Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier, Giulianella Coletti, Advances in Computational Intelligence, page 175:

     Finally, ortholinear copulas with a given diagonal section are copulas that are linear on line segments perpendicular to the main diagonal of the unit square.

4. Defining progress as one-dimensional, so that change is either a progression, a regression, or a neutral step to the side.
   • 1906, The Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, page 263:

     Besides, the facts not only do not require, they do not warrant, the Hegelian hypothesis of an ortholinear progressive development in the whole history of humanity.

   • 1976, Mary E. Ragland, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Rabelais and Panurge, page 93:

     This rather ortholinear view of development is widely held, and it is, of course, widely believed to be in harmony with the evolutionary facts.

   • 2004, Jacob Kẹhinde Olupona, Jacob O. Olupona, Beyond Primitivism, page 52:

     Most researchers, at least in the recent past, have held implicit developmental schemes in mind when using the term "primitive,” even though it has been shown that, for example, biological evolution is neither ortholinear nor unilinear.

5. Moving in one direction, in which each step leads to the next.
   • 1994, Eva Martin Sartori, Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, French Women Writers, page 427:

     A precise chronological structure and a rigorous spatial order form the foundation of the text's ortholinear narration.

   • 2007, Geoffrey Alan Wilson, Multifunctional Agriculture: A Transition Theory Perspective, page 50:

     Parayil (1999), therefore, argued that technological transition may best be described as an ortholinear or directional variation, characterised by a selective retention process adapted to a sequential process of variation and selection, while Dosi (1982: 161) concluded that "technological paradigms and trajectories are in some respects metaphors of the interplay between continuity and ruptures" in transitional processes.

   • 2008, Warren F. Motte, Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-first Century, page 185:

     That process is a wandering one, Montalbetti argues, rather than a strictly ortholinear one.

   • 2015, Eugene W. Etheridge, Millennium Sunset:

     What they found was so bizarre that any attempt to describe what they learned in the ortholinear mode, i.e., traditional writing such as I am using now, did more to distort than to clarify what they saw.

Derived terms

• ortholinearity

See also

• paralinear