me·chan·i·cal

(mĭ-kăn′ĭ-kəl)

adj.

1. Of or relating to machines or tools: mechanical skill.

2. Operated or produced by a mechanism or machine: a mechanical toy dog.

3. Of, relating to, or governed by mechanics.

4. Performed or performing in an impersonal or machinelike manner; automatic: a droning, mechanical delivery of the speech.

5. Relating to, produced by, or dominated by physical forces: the mechanical aspect of trumpet playing.

6. Philosophy Interpreting and explaining the phenomena of the universe by referring to causally determined material forces; mechanistic.

7. Of or relating to manual labor, its tools, and its skills.

n. Printing

A layout consisting of type proofs, artwork, or both, exactly positioned and prepared for making an offset or other printing plate.

me·chan′i·cal·ly adv.

me·chan′i·cal·ness n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

References in periodicals archive

Studies have praised mechanicalness, rationality and predictability that cannot be applied to the majority of the traditional organizations and are impracticable in the case of hospitals (Etzioni, 1964).

Strategic management in hospitals: Tensions between the managerial and institutional lens

Essentially it's a short cut that gets around the need to work through all the quantum variables: "We're saying that all molecules are equal, but some have this quality of 'quantum mechanicalness'."

The fact of the matter: different parts of the atomic structure behave differently, which makes simulating materials a complex task

What is more unexpectedly contradictory is that "up and down" with a negative prosody is used and repeated to depict her reading of poetry, a genre seldom defined by rigid mechanicalness and a word with positive association (Adolphs, 2006: 74).

The art of balance: a corpus-assisted stylistic analysis of Woolfian parallelism in To the Lighthouse

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