Aeronautics

How to spell aeronautics

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce aeronautics

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does aeronautics mean?

1. nounThe science and practice of designing, building, and flying aircraft through the air.

Aeronautics in a sentence

• She earned a degree in aeronautics before joining the aircraft manufacturer.

• The museum devotes a whole wing to the history of aeronautics and early flight.

Where does aeronautics come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word is built from two Greek elements: aēr, meaning 'air', and nautēs, meaning 'sailor', the same root that gives us 'nautical' and 'astronaut'. The combining piece arrived in English through the French aéronaute, a term coined in the late 1700s for the daring balloonists who first rose into the sky, modelled deliberately on the older 'Argonaut', the legendary sailors of Greek myth. From 'aeronaut' came 'aeronautics', the study of flight through the air, which settled into English in the early nineteenth century. The literal sense is therefore charmingly old, an 'air-sailor's craft', framing flight as a kind of seafaring through the atmosphere. The spelling trap lives in two places: the unusual 'aero' opening borrowed straight from Greek, and the 'nau' that sounds like a plain 'naw' but keeps its sailorly 'au'.

How the word is built

• aero- (air)
• naut (sailor)
• -ics (science or study of)