foliation
/fəʊlɪˈeɪʃn/noun
foliation is a noun meaning “The process of forming into a leaf or leaves” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-O-L-I-A-T-I-O-N and has 4 syllables, and it appears about once in every 15 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of foliation is foliations.
What does foliation mean?
noun
- 1
The process of forming into a leaf or leaves.
- 2
The process of forming into pages; pagination.
- 3
The numbering of the folios of a manuscript or a book.
- 4
The manner in which the young leaves are disposed within the bud.
- 5
The act of beating a metal into a thin plate, leaf, foil, or lamina.
- 6
The act of coating with an amalgam of tin foil and quicksilver, as in making looking-glasses.
- 7
The enrichment of an opening by means of foils, arranged in trefoils, quatrefoils, etc.; also, one of the ornaments.
- 8
The property, possessed by some crystalline rocks, of being divided into plates or layers, due to the cleavage structure of one of the constituents, as mica or hornblende. It may sometimes include slaty structure or cleavage, though the latter is usually independent of any mineral constituent, and transverse to the bedding, it having been produced by pressure.
They show that curved inclusion trails may form even with no coupling, as the porphyroblast overgrows foliation that is deflected around it.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce foliation?
- /fəʊlɪˈeɪʃn/
Foliation has 4 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-foliation.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of foliation
- foliations plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is foliation?
Foliation appears about once in every 15 million words in written English, the 117,098th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Foliation in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense topology: a set of subspaces coextensive with a manifold:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | feuilletage |
| German | Blätterung |
| Portuguese | folheação |
| Spanish | foliación |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does foliation come from?
From French foliation, from Latin folium (“leaf”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).