Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or process of conserving.
  • noun Preservation or restoration from loss, damage, or neglect.
  • noun The protection, preservation, management, or restoration of wildlife and of natural resources such as forests, soil, and water.
  • noun The maintenance of a physical quantity, such as energy or mass, during a physical or chemical change.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of conserving,guarding, or keeping with care; preservation from loss, decay, injury, or violation; the keeping of a thing in a safe or entire state.
  • noun Persistence; perdurance; permanence.
  • noun In England, a court or board of commissioners having jurisdiction over a port (as London, Liverpool, etc.) or of a river (as the Thames, the Mersey, etc.), and charged with the regulation as well as the conservation of its navigation, fisheries, etc.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of preserving, guarding, or protecting; the keeping (of a thing) in a safe or entire state; preservation.
  • noun (Astron.) the principle that the radius vector drawn from a planet to the sun sweeps over equal areas in equal times.
  • noun (Mech.) the principle that the total energy of any material system is a quantity which can neither be increased nor diminished by any action between the parts of the system, though it may be transformed into any of the forms of which energy is susceptible.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act of preserving, guarding, or protecting; the keeping (of a thing) in a safe or entire state; preservation.
  • noun A wise use of natural resources.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun (physics) the maintenance of a certain quantities unchanged during chemical reactions or physical transformations
  • noun an occurrence of improvement by virtue of preventing loss or injury or other change
  • noun the preservation and careful management of the environment and of natural resources

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The term conservation was first applied to water resources.

    AP Environmental Science Chapter 25- Issues and Options 2008

  • Gentlemen, conservation is a word that has wide application and meaning, but in the last five years it has become a hackneyed, much-abused term, glibly used by many who hunt and fish, few of whom have any idea what the word means or what it entails.

    If You're Too Busy To Go Fishing—You're Too Busy 1952

  • Simply inserting the word "conservation" in the pesticide label and slightly watering down the percentage of the active ingredient, brodifacoum, does not make this rodenticide safe for wildlife, nor will it make it any less persistent.

    Maggie Sergio: The Proposal to Poison a Wildlife Refuge Maggie Sergio 2011

  • Simply inserting the word "conservation" in the pesticide label and slightly watering down the percentage of the active ingredient, brodifacoum, does not make this rodenticide safe for wildlife, nor will it make it any less persistent.

    Maggie Sergio: The Proposal to Poison a Wildlife Refuge Maggie Sergio 2011

  • Among his other favorite places are Cuba's Zapata Swamp, which he described as a conservation triumph.

    Far-Flung Observations Ralph Gardner Jr. 2011

  • Now, the biggest sector fuelling 65 percent of green jobs, it's what they call conservation and pollution mitigation.

    CNN Transcript Dec 9, 2009 2009

  • One of the conservation laws that Leibniz takes to govern the behavior of material bodies is what he calls the conservation of relative velocity (GM VI. 227/Langley 667).

    Leibniz's Philosophy of Physics Mcdonough, Jeff 2007

  • Nevertheless, we believe the physicists have pretty generally agreed to assume as a law of Nature what they call the conservation of force, the principle we have been endeavoring to explain.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858 Various

  • Simply inserting the word "conservation" in the pesticide label and slightly watering down the percentage of the active ingredient, brodifacoum, does not make this rodenticide safe for wildlife, nor will it make it any less persistent.

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Maggie Sergio 2011

  • Firstly, many will be false positives – "conservation" is a spectrum, so the definition of a conserved element depends on where you draw the line, and the noise resulting from drift will always create some areas that appear conserved without being functional.

    Demarcation as Politics 2006

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