crosscurrent

1. 1.

   a stretch of turbulent water in a river or the sea caused by one current flowing into or across another current

   Synonymsripriptidetide ripcountercurrent

   Broaderturbulence
2. 2.

   actions counter to the main group activity

   “political crosscurrents disrupted the conference”

   Synonymscountercurrent

   Broaderstrife

Other forms of crosscurrent

plural

crosscurrents·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about crosscurrent

What does crosscurrent mean?

crosscurrent means "a stretch of turbulent water in a river or the sea caused by one current flowing into or across another current". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in crosscurrent?

crosscurrent has 3 syllables: cros-scur-rent. The stress falls on "cros". In IPA it is /ˈkɹɔˌskɝənt/.

What is another word for crosscurrent?

Close synonyms include rip, riptide, tide rip, countercurrent, countercurrent. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is crosscurrent a common word?

crosscurrent is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.