volume
Definitions
General English
- noun the amount of sound
- noun the capacity, the amount which is contained inside something
- noun one book, especially one in a series
General Science
Accounting
- noun a quantity of items
Aviation
- noun the amount of space occupied by a solid, a liquid or a gas
Banking
Computing
- noun a disk or storage device
Electronics
- The amplitude of a sound, as perceived by a listener. It is a subjective measure of sound intensity, and as such varies from person to person. Volume is influenced by the absolute amplitude of the sound, its frequency, duration, and to a lesser extent other factors. Also called loudness (1).
- The space a three dimensional object, entity, or region occupies. Usually expressed in cubic units, such as liters.
- A data storage unit such as file, a contiguous area of a disk, an area encompassing multiple disks, an optical disc, a tape cartridge, or a flash card. Also, the data contained in such a unit.
- symbolV
Food
- noun an amount of a substance
Information & Library Science
- noun a book, especially a large one
- noun one of a series in a set of books or journals
Media Studies
- noun a set of issues of a periodical spanning one calendar year
- noun a bound collection of printed or written pages
- noun the knob or button on a radio, television or audio player that controls loudness
Military
- noun a quantity of sound given out by a radio or other apparatus
Origin & History of “volume”
Volume is one of a sizeable family of English words that go back to Latin volvere ‘roll, turn’. Others include convolution (16th c.), convolvulus (16th c.), devolution (16th c.), evolution, involve (14th c.), revolt, revolution, revolve, vault, volte-face (19th c.), and voluble (16th c.). Volume itself comes via Old French volum from Latin volūmen, a derivative of volvere. The sense ‘book’ evolved from the notion of a ‘roll’ of parchment. The word came to have connotations of a ‘big’ book, and this gave rise in the 16th century to the sense ‘size of a book’. By the 17th century this had broadened out to ‘size’ in general, but the modern sense ‘size of sound’ did not emerge until the early 19th century. Latin volvere itself came ultimately from the Indo-European base *wol-, *wel- ‘turn’, which also produced English wallow.
