The building blocks of English
Affixes
-kinesis
Also ‑kinesia, ‑kinetic, and ‑kinetics.
Movement.
Greek kinēsis, motion; kinētos, movable; both from kinein, to move.
Terms in ‑kinesis are nouns indicating movement, as in hyperkinesis (Greek huper, over, beyond), a muscle spasm, or a disorder of children marked in part by hyperactivity; psychokinesis, the supposed ability to move objects by mental effort alone; telekinesis (Greek tēle‑, far off), a similar ability to move objects at a distance; kinesis itself means movement or motion.
Nouns in ‑kinesia are closely related: dyskinesia, abnormality or impairment of voluntary movement; akinesia, loss or impairment of the power of voluntary movement. Sometimes they are alternate forms of terms in ‑kinesis: hyperkinesia.
Adjectives are formed in ‑kinetic (see ‑ic), linked to either of these noun forms: dyskinetic, hyperkinetic, psychokinetic, telekinetic.
Kinetics is the branch of chemistry or biochemistry concerned with measuring and studying the rates of reactions; recently formed examples of compound terms include pharmacokinetics (Greek pharmakon, drug, medicine), studying reaction rates of drugs in the body, and toxicokinetics (Greek toxicon, poison), similarly studying toxic substances.
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