Capacity is the ability to hold a fluid, very similar to volume.
Capacity may also refer to:
- Capacity utilization, in economics, the extent to which an enterprise or a nation actually uses its potential output
- Capacity (law), the legal ability to engage in certain acts, such as making a contract
- In decision theory, a capacity is a subjective measure of likelihood of an event, similar to a membership function in fuzzy logic
- Capacity of a set, in mathematics, one way of measuring a set's size
- Battery capacity, in electrical engineering, a measure of a battery's ability to store electrical charge
- Heat capacity, in physics and chemistry, the amount of heat required to change a substance's temperature
- Carrying capacity, in biology, the ability of an environment to sustain populations
- Channel capacity, in communications
- Combining capacity, in chemistry, number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element
- Nameplate capacity, in power plants, the general number of Megawatts technically available
- Capacity factor, in power plants, an operations ratio
Famous quotes containing the word capacity:
“We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities—courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning—whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Becoming more flexible, open-minded, having a capacity to deal with change is a good thing. But it is far from the whole story. Grandparents, in the absence of the social institutions that once demanded civilized behavior, have their work cut out for them. Our grandchildren are hungry for our love and approval, but also for standards being set.”
—Eda Le Shan (20th century)
“There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness—to bring him down to the miserable level of “good” men i.e., of stupid, cowardly and chronically unhappy men.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)