unification

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The act or process of unifying.

   “The route between Melbourne and Albury is one of the first scheduled, under the great Australian gauge unification scheme, for conversion to 4 ft. 8½ in., and this will permit through running between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.”

   “Despite criticisms which were made of the Railway Executive, it must be recalled that the general framework of the new railway set-up was established by statute, while this form of organisation was particularly well adapted for carrying out the unification of the railways—a very different thing from the purely political act of nationalisation, but an essential part of the objective of nationalisation.”

2. (countable, uncountable)The state of being unified.

   “Chinese domination in Manchuria was revived after the unification of China by the Sui Dynasty in a.d. 590, though this could not be called entirely complete because the Kaokouli kingdom could not be subjugated.”

   “On the other hand, I must think of Korea and, particularly, of the three million enslaved Koreans in the North. My obligation as a leader of the Korean people is to achieve unification of our country by peaceful means if possible but by force if necessary.”

3. (countable, uncountable)An algorithmic process of solving equations between symbolic expressions.

   “For any two terms or formulas without quantifiers X and Y, the following holds. (i) The unification algorithm UNIF#95;1, applied to X, Y, terminates after a finite number of steps. (ii) #92;#123;X,Y#92;#125; is unifiable iff UNIF#95;1 so indicates upon termination. Moreover, the substitution σ then available as output is a most general unifier of #92;#123;X,Y#92;#125;.”