involution

noun

Etymology: From Latin involūtiō, from involvō.

1. Entanglement; a spiralling inwards; intricacy.

   “[…]usually his attention was diverted from her feet by her shrieks of laughter and the astounding involutions of her huge brown-yellow frame.”

   “‘Gomez,’ said the mortician, ‘is an expert only on the involutions of his own rectum.’”

2. A complicated grammatical construction.

   “1917, James Huneker, Unicorns, New York: Scribner, Chapter 11 “Style and Rhythm in English Prose,” p. 129, Walter Pater’s essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity.”

3. An endofunction whose square is equal to the identity function; a function equal to its inverse.

   “Involutions have the property that they are their own inverses.”

4. The shrinking of an organ (such as the uterus) to a former size.
5. The regressive changes in the body occurring with old age.
6. A power: the result of raising one number to the power of another.
7. A cessation of development or progress involving intense inner competition.
8. A state of increased competition for limited resources, requiring great effort to stay ahead.
9. The migration of a cell layer inward, sliding over an outer layer of cells. It occurs at gastrulation during embryogenesis.