traversal

American  

[truh-vur-suhl] / trəˈvɜr səl /

noun

1. the act or process of passing across, over, or through.

   A problem with the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it began its traversal of the rings of Saturn was eventually linked to high-speed collisions with micrometeoroids.

2. Computers. the act or process of systematically visiting all nodes of a tree or other linked data structure, usually for the purposes of collecting or transforming data at the nodes.

   Issues fixed in this release include a vulnerability in directory traversal that could give an attacker the ability to access files that should be restricted.

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Etymology

Origin of traversal

travers(e) ( def. ) + -al ² ( def. )

Example Sentences

Headlined by conductor Marco Armiliato, soprano Lisette Oropesa as the heroine Elvira and tenor Lawrence Brownlee as her beloved Arturo, this was a musically idiomatic and expressive traversal.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 2, 2026

“You’re talking about a snake robot that can do surface traversal on ice, go through holes and swim underwater — one robot that can conquer all three worlds,” Rohan Thakker, a robotics technologist at JPL.

From Los Angeles Times • Aug. 24, 2023

Horizon Call of the Mountain continues to look good Guerilla Games showed off some combat and traversal gameplay for its upcoming PSVR2 exclusive game, Horizon Call of the Mountain.

From The Verge • Jun. 2, 2022

It has established several performance series, toured internationally and worked its way steadily through all 215 of Bach’s cantatas, a traversal it completed in 2006 — whereupon it went back and started over again.

From Washington Post • Sep. 14, 2018

Swimming ability is sufficient to permit survival in water and traversal of water-barriers but ornate box turtles almost never swim voluntarily.

From Natural History of the Ornate Box Turtle, Terrapene ornata ornata Agassiz by Legler, John M.