the.com/excitation

means The act or process of raising something — an atom, a nerve, a crowd — from a resting state into a more energetic, active one.

from Rooted in Latin excitare, 'to rouse, call out, summon forth' — built from ex- ('out') plus citare ('to set in motion, call'), itself a cousin of ciere ('to move, stir'). The word kept its sense of rousing or stirring up for centuries in everyday speech before 19th- and 20th-century physics borrowed it to describe electrons and atoms jumping to higher energy states — the old idea of 'stirring something awake' repurposed for the quantum world.