spoolin01
Contributor
No doubt because in German the more common term is Eigenschaftsgrößeerhöhungoderabnahme .
Here the term apparently was first more commonly used for describing the rise or fall of the land such as for roads or railbeds. That's a pretty intuitive basis for its generalization into other areas of physical world or metaphoric use, even to color space and occasionally social science.
I found an interesting site purporting to catalog frequency of English usage of 60,000 common words. Gradient ranks #14,853 but usage is predominately in academics (760/959 cites), and even many of the other cites are clearly in a physical science context.
Looking at a few similarly ranked words with similar academic contribution to frequency of use, it scores on a rough par with oscillation, leakage, coded, inversion, and externally. Not sure that means anything other than probable flaws in that site's methodology, but at least gradient seems not wholly esoteric.
Words and phrases: frequency, genres, collocates, concordances, synonyms, and WordNet
Here the term apparently was first more commonly used for describing the rise or fall of the land such as for roads or railbeds. That's a pretty intuitive basis for its generalization into other areas of physical world or metaphoric use, even to color space and occasionally social science.
I found an interesting site purporting to catalog frequency of English usage of 60,000 common words. Gradient ranks #14,853 but usage is predominately in academics (760/959 cites), and even many of the other cites are clearly in a physical science context.
Looking at a few similarly ranked words with similar academic contribution to frequency of use, it scores on a rough par with oscillation, leakage, coded, inversion, and externally. Not sure that means anything other than probable flaws in that site's methodology, but at least gradient seems not wholly esoteric.
Words and phrases: frequency, genres, collocates, concordances, synonyms, and WordNet