Kilo Lingo

Line drawing of baterio
Coloured illustration of baterio
#2233 of 5,000 Core 5000

Translation

battery

Word origin

From French batterie, from battre ('to beat'), and behind that Latin battuere. It named a row of guns that beat on a wall long before it named anything electrical; Benjamin Franklin borrowed the artillery word for his row of connected jars, and that is the sense the whole world now uses.

Origin
French
Root
batterie
English cognates
battery, batter, combat

Examples

.

My phone's battery only lasts one day.

.

She bought new batteries for the lamp.

.

Without a battery the machine does not work at all.

Two suffixes seem to be on offer here, and neither one is. ends in -erio, so the eye tries bat- (the root of , to beat) plus -er- plus -. There is no such build: -er- means a fragment of a mass, - names countries and sciences, and neither would produce anything like a power cell. - is one indivisible borrowed root.

As with parfumo, though, the history behind the false seam is true. The French batterie really does come from battre, to beat, because a battery was first a row of cannon beating at a wall. Franklin took the military word for a row of Leyden jars wired together, and the meaning drifted from "several things acting as one" to "the thing in your torch". The beating is genuinely in there; it is just Latin history rather than Esperanto grammar.

Both senses survive. is the everyday power cell, but also a battery of guns, and a is a barrage of questions. Akumulatoro is the more technical word for a rechargeable one, though most speakers say for everything and let context sort it out.

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baterio: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 45.