Help me with longitudinal and transverse waves?

Question

I need to understand how to categorize waves and i heard about longitudinal and transverse waves. I dont understand what it is? can you explain it? Ive seen the wikipedia article on it so i dont want you to just copy paste it cause i dont understand what the wikipedia was saying i don tget it, help1

Answer 1

A wave is a disturbance in a medium that travels through the medium.

A transverse wave is the kind of wave you make if you pluck a string, a pulse travels down the string. "Trans" means across and if you look at the pulse that is traveling along the string, the pulse is moving up and down which is across the string (assuming the string is horizontal).

A longitudinal wave is best visualized with a slinky. If you stretch a slinky out and pull one of the springs back and release it, a pulse travels along the slinky. BUT this pulse is parallel to the slinky, not perpendicular to it.

Sound waves are longitudinal. Waves on the surface of water are transverse waves. Light waves are weird, they are electromagnetic waves, but because they can be polarized they are considered to be more similar to transverse waves than they are to longitudinal waves.

Answer 2

longitudinal waves are waves that displace energy parallel to the medium (example: slinky being pushed after being streched out)
a transverse wave is when energy is displaced at a right angle to the medium (example: stadium wave, people move up and down, but the wave moves left or right)