The definition of work given in books is The work is said to be done by a force on a body, when the body is moved by the force through some 'displacement'.
Now let a body of mass $m$ at rest. When a force $F$ is applied on it, it gets accelerated and starts moving. It will keep moving until an another force is applied on the body. If no other force is applied on the body to prevent its state of motion, it will be continuously covering more and more displacement (in the direction of applied force).
So, in the above definition what does the word 'displacement' refer to?
[Physics] What does the ‘displacement’ refer to in the definition of work
definitiondisplacementforcesnewtonian-mechanicswork
Best Answer
The distance referred to in the definition of work is, specifically, the distance that the object moves while the force is being applied. This is because the actual definition of work is a line integral, where the work $W$ along a path $C$ with tangent vector $d\vec{s}$ is defined as:
$$W=\int_C \vec{F}\cdot d\vec{s}$$
In general, calculating the work done requires that you specify a path along which the object moves first, which is why the notion of "force applied over a distance" makes sense; it's really more like "force applied along a specific path." For a special class of forces (conservative forces), the work done does not depend on the path taken, but only on the starting and ending points. These forces turn out to be exactly the kinds of forces for which you can define a potential energy, since the work done between any two points by that force is just the difference in the potential energy between those points.