Dictionary:

dilation

  (dī-lā'shən, dĭ-)

1. The act of expanding or the state of being expanded.
2. Medicine. See dilatation (sense 2).
3. A lengthy spoken or written discussion on a topic: “an Edith Whartonesque dilation on a social class steeped in hypocrisy” (Caroline Seebohm).

The act of stretching or dilating.

The term dilation may have a number of meanings:

In physiology, where it is synonymous with dilatation, it may mean:

• Pupil dilation (mydriasis)
• Dilation of blood vessels (vasodilation)
• Cervical dilation (or dilation of the cervix) in childbirth
• Dilation and curettage (surgical dilation)
• Dilation following vaginoplasty

In mathematics:

• Dilation on a metric
• Dilation of an operator

In physics:

• Dilation (or dilatation) is a scaling transformation (see scale invariance and conformal symmetry)
• Time dilation

In morphological image processing (a subset of digital image processing):

• Dilation (morphology)

In music:

• Dilate, a 1996 album by Ani DiFranco

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