embed, imbed, v.
(ɛm-, ɪmˈbɛd)
[f. en-, in- + bed n. (Embed is now the more common form.)]
1. a. trans. To fix firmly in a surrounding mass of some solid material. Also refl.
| α 1794 R. J. Sulivan View Nat. I. viii. 62 Calcareous substances are in general found where flints are embedded. 1861 Hulme tr. Moquin-Tandon ii. iii. iv. 147 Leeches..embed themselves in the earth. 1879 J. Timbs in Cassell's Techn. Educ. IV. 6/2 Iron girders embedded in brickwork and cement. 1882 Standard 5 Sept. 6/1 The workman takes one diamond and embeds it in heated cement. |
| β 1778 Whitehurst Inquiry Earth xii. 90 Marine exuviæ found imbedded near the tops of mountains. 1793 M. Baillie Morb. Anat. xxiv. 302 Masses of the same sort of substance, lying as it were imbedded in the brain. 1816 R. Jameson Char. Min. (1817) 130 Crystals are said to be imbedded, when they are completely inclosed in another mineral. 1866 Livingstone Jrnl. (1873) I. i. 29 Thus..insects are..imbedded in the gum-copal. 1950 C. R. Hine Machine Tools for Engineers xii. 240 The fine, sharp abrasive particles become imbedded in the lap and it is ready for use. 1972 Physics Bull. May 284/3 Indeed, the liquid crystalline properties inherent in this bilayer structure are almost certainly important for the organization of molecules imbedded in the membrane as well as for controlling transport through it. |
b. fig. spec. in Linguistics and Sci.
| α 1835 Lytton Rienzi i. xii, The light..embedded, as it were, in vast masses of shade. 1855 Bain Senses & Int. ii. ii. §12 The sensation is embedded in a movement. 1870 Lowell Among my Bks. Ser. i. (1873) 79 The winged seeds of his thought embed themselves in the memory. 1961 [see embedded ppl. a.]. |
| β 1855 Bain Senses & Int. ii. ii. §13 The same optical impression..may..be imbedded in a great many different muscular impressions. 1875 Maine Hist. Inst. i. 14 Parts of these..writings are imbedded in the text of the Book. 1969 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 16 Jan. 4/4 Some of the divergences between Freud and Jung are, however, better attributed to the fact that they chose opposed solutions to the problem of how to imbed the idea of the unconscious into already existing traditions of Western thought. 1971 Nature 18 June 437/2 It will be noted that the regions of the three brightest sources are further imbedded in very dense areas; in fact, they are close to the centroids of the Coma cluster. 1971 Powell & Higman Finite Simple Groups iii. 174 The process simply imbeds one Chevalley group in another. |
c. transf. Also in wider senses suggested by the etymology.
| 1848 Clough Amours de Voy. iii. 302 Nemi, imbedded in wood, Nemi inurned in the hill! 1849 Grote Greece (1862) V. ii. lx. 300 A more considerable stream, flowing deeply imbedded between lofty banks. 1852 M. Arnold Poems, Emped. on Etna 11, Through whose [Typho's] heart Etna drives her roots of stone To imbed them in the sea. |
2. Said of the surrounding mass of material: To enclose firmly. Also fig.
| 1853 Kane Grinnell Exp. xxvi. (1856) 210 Fields of new ice..imbedded them in a single night. 1855 I. Taylor Restor. Belief 215 Those Seven Epistles..imbed our problem. 1887 Harper's Mag. May 955 A soft sweetish pulp..embeds the two beans. |
Hence emˈbedded ppl. a., emˈbeddedness, emˈbedding vbl. n. and ppl. a.
| 1830 Lyell Princ. Geol. I. 85 Others ascribed the imbedded fossil bodies to some plastic power which resided in the earth in the early ages of the world. 1863 ― Antiq. Man 8, I have spoken of the embedding of organic bodies and human remains in peat. 1877 W. Thomson Voy. Challenger I. ii. 113 The elegant forms of the imbedded shells. 1877 E. Conder Bas. Faith vii. 315 Smelting out the pure gold of revealed truth from the imbedding ore. 1922 Whitehead Princ. Relativ. ii. 15 Fact..is not the sum of factors; it is rather the concreteness (or, embeddedness) of factors, and the concreteness of an inexhaustible relatedness among inexhaustible relata. 1937 Mind XLVI. 83 When we know how to deal with the erst-while novelty, when we have ‘got it taped’, it falls into embeddedness and becomes, or engenders, a part of ourselves. 1952 T. Parsons Social System 361 Philosophical investigation, as distinguished from the general imbeddedness of philosophical problems..in any system of action. 1961 C. S. Smith in Language XXXVII. 346 When one sentence contains another, the latter sentence will be said to be ‘embedded’. Ibid. 348 Together the three embedding rules produce all sentences that contain adjectives and exclude ungrammatical sentences. Ibid. 360 An embedded compared adjective has the widest possible scope in any given sentence. 1963 Economist 7 Sept. 832/1 Man's social embeddedness. 1966 G. N. Leech Eng. in Advertising ii. 20 The prepositional phrase in ‘a pipeful of good tobacco’ is an embedded adverbial group. 1968 Language XLIV. 32 Any rules that are not concerned with embedded sentences..always treat a constituent sentence as an unanalysable unit. |
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Add: [1.] d. Math. To represent (a graph) by points and lines in a given surface in such a way that no two edges intersect; to incorporate (a mathematical structure) in a larger structure while preserving all important structural features, esp. by the use of a function which is an embedding. Also transf.
| 1922 H. L. Brose tr. Weyl's Space, Time, Matter ii. 89 The geometry of the surface deals with the inner measure relations of the surface that belong to it independently of the manner in which it is embedded in space. 1935 Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. XLI. 931 This paper deals with an extension of the Gauss formulas of a surface imbedded in ordinary space to apply to an m-dimensional variety imbedded in an n-dimensional euclidean space. 1941 Birkhoff & MacLane Survey Mod. Algebra 47 The domain J can be embedded as a subdomain in a field R, each element of which is a quotient of integers of J. 1961 Jrnl. Math. & Mech. X. 517 (heading) On imbedding graphs in the sphere. 1964 IEEE Trans. Electronic Computers XIII. 395/2 For a base language L, and an augmented programming language L{p}, if L is a proper subset of L{p} and if any program written strictly in L has the same interpretation within both L and L{p}, then we say L is embedded in L{p}. 1971 Powell & Higman Finite Simple Groups iii. 174 The process simply imbeds one Chevalley group in another. 1979 Proc. London Math. Soc. XXXVIII. 270 The larger the subcategory of {scrT} which one seeks to embed in a quasitopos, the worse the embedding becomes. |
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▸ trans. orig. U.S. Mil. To attach (a journalist) to a military unit to report on a conflict. Also intr.: (of a journalist) to be attached to a military unit in this way. Chiefly with with. Also in extended use.
| 1995 Los Angeles Times 23 Dec. a13/1 In the jargon of the Army, I'm ‘embedded’ with the troops: I go where they go, share their quarters, eat their meals... Before the trip, Army officials said only a small number of reporters were being allowed to ‘embed’. 1996 Washington Post 8 May a24/5 We are facing some resistance to embedding reporters in units... It was not reasonable to expect sergeants, privates.., anybody in this unit, to be on guard and talking on the record, 24 hours a day. 2004 N.Y. Mag. 7 June 36/1 Just before the bombs began falling on Baghdad, Miller embedded with Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha—the unit charged with scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. 2005 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) (Nexis) 11 Sept. 17 In future hurricane alerts, expect journalists to be ‘embedded’ with the National Guard like they were in Iraq. |