Accelerator

How to spell accelerator

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce accelerator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does accelerator mean?

1. nounThe pedal in a vehicle that the driver presses to increase engine speed.
2. nounA machine that drives charged particles to very high speeds for scientific research.

Accelerator in a sentence

• She pressed the accelerator gently to merge onto the motorway.

• The laboratory built a circular accelerator to study subatomic collisions.

• The mechanic found that the accelerator cable had frayed.

• Engineers spent years calibrating the giant accelerator beneath the campus.

Where does accelerator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin verb accelerare, meaning 'to hasten' or 'to speed up', which was formed from the prefix ad- ('to' or 'towards') and the adjective celer, meaning 'swift' or 'quick'. That same celer root survives in 'celerity', a slightly literary English word for speed. English took 'accelerate' in the late 1500s and built the agent noun 'accelerator' soon after to name a person or thing that produces increased speed. When motor cars arrived around 1900 the name attached naturally to the pedal that opens the throttle, and physicists later applied it to machines that drive particles to enormous velocities. A useful spelling clue: the double c sits at the front because the Latin prefix ad- assimilated to ac- before celer, and there is only a single l, which is the spot writers most often double by mistake.

How the word is built

• ac- (ad-: to, towards)
• celer (swift, fast)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -or (agent or instrument that performs the action)