1. vortex - Noun
2. vortex - Verb
A mass of fluid, especially of a liquid, having a whirling or circular motion tending to form a cavity or vacuum in the center of the circle, and to draw in towards the center bodies subject to its action; the form assumed by a fluid in such motion; a whirlpool; an eddy.
A supposed collection of particles of very subtile matter, endowed with a rapid rotary motion around an axis which was also the axis of a sun or a planet. Descartes attempted to account for the formation of the universe, and the movements of the bodies composing it, by a theory of vortices.
Any one of numerous species of small Turbellaria belonging to Vortex and allied genera. See Illustration in Appendix.
Source: Webster's dictionaryThe image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. Ezra Pound
The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex. James Madison
Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing. George Bernard Shaw
I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther! Thomas Carlyle
Intercourse is a world that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Andrea Dworkin