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

See Examples For:

traversal

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

Not content with hosting Angela Hewitt’s ongoing survey of Bach, the 92Y now kicks off a complete traversal of Brahms’s piano works in Ohlsson’s safe hands.

From New York Times ● Oct. 25, 2018

Thus he says, "When the traversal is at an infinite distance, all is unimaginable."

From An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry by Lehmer, Derrick Norman