Airborne

How to spell airborne

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce airborne

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does airborne mean?

1. adjectiveCarried, transported, or transmitted through the air, including aircraft in flight, troops dropped by parachute, and particles or diseases suspended in the air.

Airborne in a sentence

• The airborne troops parachuted into the valley at dawn.

• The infection is airborne and spreads quickly in crowded rooms.

Where does airborne come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound word built from two English elements: 'air' and 'borne'. The first part, 'air', came into English through Old French from the Latin aer, which in turn was borrowed from the Greek aer, meaning the lower atmosphere or the gas we breathe. The second and trickier part, 'borne', is the older past participle of the verb 'bear', meaning 'to carry', and it descends from the Old English beran, a thoroughly native Germanic word for carrying or bearing. English has long kept two spellings of that past participle: 'born' for the sense of being given birth, and 'borne' for the sense of being carried or endured, and it is the carrying sense that supplies the second half here. The full compound 'airborne', literally 'carried by the air', is recorded from around the early twentieth century and spread quickly with the rise of aviation and parachute troops. The whole spelling trap lives in that final 'e': because the word means 'carried through the air', it takes the 'borne' spelling, never 'born'.

How the word is built

• air (the air, atmosphere)
• borne (carried, past participle of bear, from Old English beran 'to carry')