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
Free printable study downloads for the Esperanto word "baterio" (battery): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.
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Start your free weekThis word is part of lesson 45.