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:
“Rice and peas fit into that category of dishes where two ordinary foods, combined together, ignite a pleasure far beyond the capacity of either of its parts alone. Like rhubarb and strawberries, apple pie and cheese, roast pork and sage, the two tastes and textures meld together into the sort of subtle transcendental oneness that we once fantasized would be our experience when we finally found the ideal mate.”
—John Thorne, U.S. cookbook writer. Simple Cooking, “Rice and Peas: A Preface with Recipes,” Viking Penguin (1987)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)