absorber

plural absorbers

1. Something that absorbs.

   Which can be ignited the more easily with a burning-glass, black or white paper? Black paper, since it is a much better absorber of heat.

   c. 1869, Joel Dorman Steele, Answers to the Practical Questions and Problems contained in the Fourteen Weeks Courses in Physiology, Philosophy, Astronomy, and Chemistry, New York: A.S. Barnes, page 45

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   […] these Symptoms are only curred, by such Medicines as correct the Acidity and Acrimony of the Blood, viz. When it most partakes of Acrimony by sweet diaphoretick Decoctions, or some sort of Acids, which dull and take off their corroding Edges, or when they are more Acid, by volatile Salts that carry them off by Sweat or Urine; or by Acid Absorbers, which by correcting the Acidities of the Pancreatick Juice, leave the Ferment of the Liver more predominant […]

   1698, Richard Boulton, A Treatise Concerning the Heat of the Blood and Also of the Use of the Lungs, London: A. & J. Churchill, page 121

   1756, Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq., London: J. Noon, Chapter 36 “Remarks on the delluge,” p. , The swallows especially must do great work in the case, if we take into their number not only very many open gulphs or chasms, the depth of which no line or sound can reach; but likewise the communications of very many parts of the sea, and of many great unfathomable lochs, with the abyss. These absorbers could easily receive what had before come out of them.

   1. A device which causes gas or vapor to be absorbed by a liquid.First known use First attested in the mid 19ᵗʰ century.
   2. nuclear physicsA material that absorbs neutrons in a reactor.
2. A person who absorbs.First known use First attested in the mid 19ᵗʰ century.

   Old Lady Dacier’s bluntness in speaking of her grandson would have shocked Lady Wathin as much as it astonished, had she been less of an ardent absorber of aristocratic manners.

   1885, George Meredith, chapter 12, in Diana of the Crossways, volume II, London: Chapman & Hall, pages 272–273

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   […] since few wanted mosaics any more he had turned to fresco, becoming the greatest absorber and eclectic in Italy. He had learned everything that the earlier fresco painters, from the time of Cimabue, had to teach.

   1958, Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Book One, Chapter 5, p. 23

   […] Walter D. (“Walt”) DeLasandro Jr. had been able to bill her parents $130 an hour plus expenses for being put in the middle and playing the role of mediator and absorber of shit from both sides while she (i.e., the depressed person, as a child) had had to perform essentially the same coprophagous services on a more or less daily basis for free […]

   1999, David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person”, in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, New York: Back Bay Books, page 47

3. mathematicsA set that, under suitable transformations, can contain any set from a given class within a topological space.

   By proposition 6.5.4, X is a skeletoid and hence an absorber by theorem 6.5.1.

   1988, J. van Mill, Infinite-Dimensional Topology: Prerequisites and Introduction, page 285

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   Skeletoids and absorbers play an important role in infinite-dimensional topology. The existence and uniqueness of skeletoids (and absorbers) with respect to certain collections allow one to study completely metrizable infinite-dimensional manifolds by using the technique of compact manifolds, incomplete manifolds by those of complete ones and so on.

   2020, Howard Cook, Continua: With the Houston Problem Book, page 70