Airflow

How to spell airflow

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce airflow

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does airflow mean?

1. nounThe movement or rate of movement of air, especially through a passage, machine, or ventilation system.

Airflow in a sentence

• The engineer measured the airflow through each heating duct.

• Good airflow around the laptop stops the processor from overheating.

Where does airflow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent modern compound built from two very old native English words. 'Air' came into Middle English through Old French air, which traced back to the Latin aer and ultimately the Greek aer, meaning the lower atmosphere or the gas we breathe. 'Flow' is the older partner, descending from the Old English flowan, a verb meaning to run as a liquid or to stream, related to a whole family of Germanic words for moving water. The two were joined into 'airflow' only in the industrial and engineering age, roughly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when people needed a tidy term for the measured movement of air through ducts, engines, and ventilation systems. Because it is a plain closed compound, the spelling holds no real surprise: you simply write 'air' and 'flow' together with no space or hyphen.

How the word is built

• air (compound element, the gaseous mixture we breathe)
• flow (movement of a fluid in a stream)