Airliner

How to spell airliner

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce airliner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does airliner mean?

1. nounA large aircraft that carries passengers on scheduled commercial routes.

Airliner in a sentence

• The airliner taxied slowly toward the runway before takeoff.

• Every seat on the airliner was booked for the holiday weekend.

Where does airliner come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining the native word 'air', which descends from the Latin aer by way of Old French but had long been at home in English, to 'liner'. A liner originally meant a ship that ran a fixed, scheduled route belonging to a shipping 'line', a sense that grew up in the great age of ocean travel during the nineteenth century. When passenger aviation matured in the early twentieth century, the word 'airliner' was coined by simply prefixing 'air' to that maritime 'liner', describing a large aircraft that carried passengers along established commercial routes. The term became common in the 1920s and 1930s as scheduled flying took hold. The spelling is logical once you see the buried word 'line' inside it, with the single 'l' and the agent ending '-er' carried straight over from the ship sense.

How the word is built

• air (atmosphere/flight)
• line (a regular transport route)
• -er (agent noun, a vessel serving that route)