Migrate
Pronunciation
- IPA: /maɪ'ɡrət/
Origin
From Latin migratus, past participle of migrÅ ("migrate, change, transport")
Full definition of migrate
Verb
- (intransitive) To relocate periodically from one region to another, usually according to the seasons.
- Twice a year the geese migrate — from Florida to Canada and back again.
- Twice a year the Minnesotans migrate from their state to the Gulf of Mexico.
- (intransitive) To change one's geographic pattern of habitation.Many groups had migrated to western Europe from the plains of eastern Europe.
- (intransitive) To change habitations across a border; to move from one country or political region to another.
- To escape persecution, they migrated to a neutral country.
- (intransitive) To move slowly towards, usually in groups.
- Once the hosts started bickering in the kitchens, the guests began to migrate towards the living room.
- (transitive, computing): To move computer code or files from one computer or network to another.
- They had finished migrating all of the affected code to the production server by 2:00am, three hours later than expected.
- (transitive, marketing) To induce customers to shift purchases from one set of a company's related products to another.We were hoping to migrate the customers of the "C" series to the "E" series and the "E" customers to the "S" series.
Usage notes
Some people consider the jargonistic transitive form of this word to be improper, on the grounds that it is untraditional, and that if a transitive verb is to be constructed from migrate it should still be the subject that is doing the migrating. Alternatives include move, herd, transfer, or relocate. This objection is not widespread however, and migrate is the only term generally used to mean specifically the movement of computer code from one computer to another. Usually both computers are servers of some sort.