Sports medicine and training

L’amplitude de mouvement opens this list and is the entry an English reader is likeliest to carry across word for word, because the noun looks ready for it and is not. In English, « amplitude » belongs to physics: it is the height of a wave, the distance a vibration travels from its resting position, and outside that it survives only in a bookish sense of abundance, as in « the amplitude of her learning ». No physiotherapist has ever written it on a chart. The French noun is far wider and completely ordinary. L’amplitude is the extent of any variation whatever: l’amplitude thermique is the gap between the coldest and the warmest hour of a day, l’amplitude horaire is the span a working shift covers, l’amplitude d’un mouvement is how far a joint travels before it stops. The clinical English for that last one is « range of motion », shortened in notes to « ROM », and « range » is the word to reach for every time: a joint has a range, a temperature has a range, a shift has a span. Nothing in the family has an amplitude.