Accelerate

How to spell accelerate

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce accelerate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does accelerate mean?

1. verbTo increase the speed of something, or to make a process happen sooner or faster.

Accelerate in a sentence

• The driver pressed the pedal to accelerate onto the motorway.

• New funding should accelerate the building project considerably.

Where does accelerate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin accelerare, meaning 'to hasten' or 'to quicken'. It was formed from the prefix ad-, meaning 'to' or 'towards', which assimilated to ac- before the c, joined to the adjective celer, which literally meant 'swift' or 'quick'. The same celer root survives in the English word 'celerity', a slightly formal term for speed. English took the word up in the late 1500s, first in the literal sense of making something move faster and later in figurative uses about speeding up processes or schedules. The doubled c is the spelling trap, and it makes sense once you remember the buried prefix ad- collided with celer to give ac-c, so two distinct pieces are pressed together.

How the word is built

• ac- (from ad-: to, towards)
• celer (swift, fast)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)