galvanic

From French galvanique, named after Italian physiologist Luigi Aloisio Galvani (1737–1798) + -ique.

• IPA^(key): /ɡælˈvænɪk/

galvanic (comparative more galvanic, superlative most galvanic)

1. Of or pertaining to galvanism; electric.
   • 1871, Harriet Beecher Stowe, chapter 22, in Pink and White Tyranny:

     [S]he was quivering like a galvanic battery with the suppressed force of some powerful emotion.

2. (by extension) Energetic, vigorous.
   • 1862, Anthony Trollope, chapter 6, in North America:

     Whether the town existed during Mr. Tapley's time I have not been able to learn. . . . At that moment a galvanic motion had been pumped into it by the war movements of General Halleck.

   • 1908, W. W. Jacobs, chapter 19, in Salthaven:

     Then he clenched his fists, and, with an agility astonishing in a man of his years, indulged in a series of galvanic little hops in front of the astounded Peter Truefitt.

   • 2014 April 4, Zachary Woolfe, "Music: How the Centuries Will Play Out," New York Times (retrieved 12 May 2014):

     But the main event may well end up being the performance of Brahms’s galvanic Piano Concerto No. 1, with the exhilarating British pianist Paul Lewis.

3. Of a current that is not alternating, as opposed to faradic.
   • 2005, Carolyn Thomas de la Pena, chapter 3, in The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American:

     Physicians used galvanic currents, which required only a galvanic power source, and faradic treatments, which utilized an "alternating" induction coil.

• galvanical

• electrogalvanic
• galvanically

• galvanize