concatenation

Borrowed from Latin concatenātiō. Related to chain.

• IPA^(key): /kɑnˌkæt.ɪˈneɪ.ʃən/, /kənˌkæt.əˈneɪ.ʃən/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eɪʃən
• Hyphenation: con‧cat‧e‧na‧tion

concatenation (countable and uncountable, plural concatenations)

1. (countable) A series of links united; a series or order of things depending on each other, as if linked together; a chain, a succession.
   • 1927, Albert Einstein, as quoted by H. G. Kessler in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971)

     Try and penetrate with our limited means of the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.

2. (uncountable) The application of these series of links.
   • 2000, Philippe Byrnes, Protocol Management in Computer Networking, page 376:

     We also discuss the faults to which the intermediate systems that execute these concatenation tasks are liable; the consequences of such faults include end-to-end PDUs being misforwarded, proliferating without limit, or simply disappearing into “black holes.”

3. (programming) The operation of joining multiple character strings.
4. (programming) A character string formed by joining multiple character strings.

• concatenate