range

A line or series of mountains, buildings, etc.

Noun

  1. A line or series of mountains, buildings, etc.
  2. A fireplace; a fire or other cooking apparatus; now specifically, a large cooking stove with many burners (hotplates).
    • Therein an hundred raunges weren pight, / And hundred fournaces all burning bright; / By euery fournace many feendes did byde, / Deformed creatures, horrible in ſight, / And euery feend his buſie paines applyde, / To...
    • There was juſt ſuch another Innocent as this, in my Fathers Family : He did the Courſe Work in the Kitchin, and was bid at his firſt Coming to take off the Range, and let down the Cynders before he went to Bed. - 1692,...
  3. Selection, array.
    • We sell a wide range of cars.
    • But through the oligopoly, charcoal fuel proliferated throughout London's trades and industries. By the 1200s, brewers and bakers, tilemakers, glassblowers, pottery producers, and a range of other craftsmen all became...
    • Hidden behind thickets of acronyms and gorse bushes of detail, a new great game is under way across the globe. Some call it geoeconomics, but it's geopolitics too. The current power play consists of an extraordinary...
  4. An area for practicing shooting at targets.
  5. An area for military training or equipment testing.

    Synonyms: base training area training ground

  6. The distance from a person or sensor to an object, target, emanation, or event.
    • We could see the ship at a range of five miles.
    • One can use the speed of sound to estimate the range of a lightning flash.

    Synonyms: distance radius

  7. The maximum distance or reach of capability (of a weapon, radio, detector, etc.).
    • This missile's range is 500 kilometres.
  8. The distance a vehicle (e.g., a car, bicycle, lorry, or aircraft) can travel without refueling.
    • This aircraft's range is 15 000 kilometres.
  9. An area of open, often unfenced, grazing land.
    • There is a young cowboy, he lives on the range / His horse and his cattle are his only companions - 1970, James Taylor, “Sweet Baby James”, in Sweet Baby James, →OCLC:
  10. The extent or space taken in by anything excursive; compass or extent of excursion; reach; scope.
    • As to acquir’d habits and abilities in Learning, his Writings having given the World ſufficient account of them, there remains onely to obſerve, that the range and compaſs of his knowledge fill’d the whole Circle of the...
    • For we may further obſerve that men of the greateſt abilities are moſt fired with ambition : and that, on the contrary, mean and narrow minds are the leaſt actuated by it ; whether it be that a man’s ſenſe of his own...
    • Far as Creation’s ample range extends, / The ſcale of Senſual, Mental pow’rs aſcends : / Mark how it mounts, to Man’s imperial race, / From the green myriads in the peopled graſs ! - 1733–34, Alexander Pope, An Essay on...
  11. The set of values (points) which a function can obtain.

    Antonyms: domain

  12. The length of the smallest interval which contains all the data in a sample; the difference between the largest and smallest observations in the sample.

Origin

From Middle English rengen, from Old French rengier (“to range, to rank, to order,”), from the noun renc, reng, ranc, rang (“a rank, row”), from Frankish *hring, from Proto-Germanic *hringaz (“ring, circle, curve”). Doublet of ring.

Forms

ranges

Hyponyms

artillery range grenade range gunnery range live-fire range missile range rocket range tank range archery range firing range indoor range shooting range target range slant range effective range maximum range

Derived

Alaska Range Avenue Range azran basin and range topography Basket Range Biban Range bitrange Bitterroot Range Black Range Border Ranges Brooks Range Brown Range Bugle Ranges Cape Range National Park Cascade Range Central Mountain Range Clear Range close-range close range close the range crossrange Darling Range disrange downrange

Verb

  1. To travel over (an area, etc); to roam, wander.
  2. To rove over or through.
    • to range the fields
    • Novv to the copſe thy leſſer ſpaniel take, / Teach him to range the ditch, and force the brake; […] - 1713, John Gay, “Rural Sports. A Georgic. Inscribed to Mr. [Alexander] Pope.”, in Poems on Several Occasions, volume...
  3. To exercise the power of something over something else; to cause to submit to, over.
    • The soule is variable in all manner of formes, and rangeth to her selfe, and to her estate, whatsoever it be, the senses of the body, and all other accidents. - 1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 40, in John Florio,...
  4. To bring (something) into a specified position or relationship (especially, of opposition) with something else.
    • At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging alongside. - 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 22”, in Moby-Dick; or, The...
    • In ranging herself as a partisan on the side of Major Pallaby Mrs. Hoopington had been largely influenced by the fact that she had made up her mind to marry him at an early date. - 1910, Saki [pseudonym; Hector Hugh...
  5. Of a variable, to be able to take any of the values in a specified range.
    • The variable x ranges over all real values from 0 to 10.
    • The police seized 12,000 files containing information on a wide range of organisations and individuals. The ADL claimed to be only monitoring ‘hate groups’, and denied passing information to Israel or South Africa. But...
    • In the past two years, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has located nearly 3,000 exoplanet candidates ranging from sub-Earth-sized minions to gas giants that dwarf our own Jupiter. Their densities range from that of...

    Synonyms: run

  6. To classify.
    • to range plants and animals in genera and species
    • The coins are ranged into nine classes. - 1785, William Coxe, Travels Into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, page 129:
    • All requirements could be ranged into the classes. - 2013, Hubert Kals, Fred van Houten, Integration of Process Knowledge into Design Support, page 378:
  7. To form a line or a row.
    • The front of a house ranges with the street.
    • The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms, / Amidst the soundless solitudes immense / Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs. - 1873, James Thomson (B.V.), The City of Dreadful Night:
  8. To be placed in order; to be ranked; to admit of arrangement or classification; to rank.
    • And range with humble livers in content. - 1613 (date written), William Shakespeare, [John Fletcher], “The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, &...
  9. To set in a row, or in rows; to place in a regular line or lines, or in ranks; to dispose in the proper order.
    • Maccabeus ranged his army by hands. - 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Bible Maccabees/#12 2 Maccabees:12–20:
    • Were this dependence of the body and mind more studied, and its effects collected and ranged into proper order; no doubt, we would be able to form a better judgment of it, and see further into the good purposes to which...
  10. To place among others in a line, row, or order, as in the ranks of an army; usually, reflexively and figuratively, to espouse a cause, to join a party, etc.
    • It would be absurd in me to range myself on the side of the Duke of Bedford and the corresponding society. - 1796, Edmund Burke, A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, on the Attacks Made upon...
  11. To be native to, or live in, a certain district or region.
    • The peba ranges from Texas to Paraguay.
  12. To determine the range to a target.

Forms

ranges ranging ranged

Derived

broad-ranging wide-ranging