whirl
[ + adv/prep ]
If a large group of people eddies somewhere, the people go there together while constantly moving around within their group:
He joined the flood of students eddying toward the second-floor lockers.
She watched the small groups of protesters eddy across the courtyard.
[ + adv/prep ]
to come and go in large quantities, without becoming firmly fixed:
He is adept at placing Einstein in the stream of ideas and theories that eddied about in the intellectual currents of the day.
But what is all this stuff that eddies in your head all the time?

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Movement of liquids
backsplash
be dripping with somethingidiom
brim
brim over
brim with something
drip
funnel
leakage
pour-over
reinject
reinjection
respray
ripple
run a bathphrase
spate
stem
swash
swill
swirl
swirling

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Revolving, rotating and spinning
Temporary
eddy
noun[ C ]
uk /ˈed.i/ us /ˈed.i/
a fast, circular movement of water, wind, smoke, etc.:
The bend in the river had caused an eddy of fast swirling water.
a situation in which a lot of things are happening or changing at one time:
She was caught up in an eddy of social engagements.
The swirling eddy of privacy concerns will be taken up by both House and Senate Commerce committees in the coming months.
There is a passage between the islands and the shore filled with sunken rocks, which form violent eddies.
They bicycled to a secluded spot among the willows where the water swirled into an eddy about four feet deep.
If you put a particle in the middle of the light loop, it would be dragged around by gravitational force, much like the eddies created when you stir a spoon in a cup of coffee.
The pictures showed that when the water reached a certain speed, it began to break into eddies, waves and cross-currents.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Floods, tides & currents
atmospheric river
deluge
flash flood
flood
floodplain
gyre
high tide
high water mark
inundation
longshore drift
low tide
low-water mark
overwhelm
tidal
tidally
tide table
turbulence
turbulent
waterline
whelm

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Changing frequently

eddy | American Dictionary

eddy
verb[ I ]
us/ˈed·i/
(of water, wind, smoke, etc.) to move fast in a circle:
The water eddied ceaselessly in the wake of the boat.

eddy

noun[ C ]us/ˈed·i/

Examples of eddy

eddy
These larger eddies can stir the fluid more efficiently, thereby reducing concentration fluctuations (see figure 4).
The presence of active small-scale turbulence appears responsible for the continuing isotropy of the smallest eddies.
A commonly used procedure to estimate turbulent diffusion times is in terms of enhanced turbulent (eddy) diffusivities.
As soon as t* = 1.5, the velocities become sufficiently high in the wake for a pair of secondary eddies to develop.
In comparing with figure 6, we observe that details of the two spectral eddy-viscosities differ.
However, as the eddy did not increase in size further, this rate decreased downstream of the eddy formation.
For instance, the isotropic eddy viscosity hypothesis does not predict the observed fact that the shear stress and mean velocity gradient vectors have different directions.
In computing the response function, we want to capture the deformation of the fluid eddies while excluding the simple advection due to a large-scale flow.
These eddies or waves would occur and interact randomly in space and time in a natural flow (without excitation).
The inner boundary jet is still evident, but the eddy motion inside it is greater than in the westerly-forcing case.
This changes the size and position of the first eddies that form and thus changes the location and frequency of any coalescence of the eddies.
At higher frequencies, these eddies which formed a t the forcing frequency were small and quickly lost their identities by coalescence.
At higher frequencies, these eddies which form a t the forcing frequency are small and are quickly lost by coalescence.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.