Now what exactly does momentum mean

[Andrew Mason]

Now what exactly does momentum mean??
We think of force as a push or pull...
We acceleration as change in motion (speeding up/down, turning..etc-etc...)
We think speed as amt. distance/time...

But momentum??What is it---i need a definition OTHER than mass*velocity...
I need a definition other than a change in impulse (force*change in time)

What does momentum PHYSICALLY (push/pull, speed up/down) represent?

The closest thing in my head is "inertia with respect to velocity"--

But yeah...what does momentum PHYSICALLY represent? The product of mass and velocity...what does it MEAN? ("physically-speaking")?

I'll take a stab at it, FWIW.

Momentum may be thought of as a measure of the amount of external pushing or pulling a system has experienced in its past. Since $p = \int Fdt$ a system accumulates all the impulses and stores them. We know it stores these impulses because in the absence of forces (ie. F=0), dp/dt = F = 0, so p does not change.

AM