Antenna

How to spell antenna

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce antenna

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does antenna mean?

1. nounA metal rod, wire, or dish used to transmit or receive radio, television, or other electromagnetic signals.
2. nounOne of a pair of slender sensory appendages on the head of an insect, crustacean, or similar animal.

Antenna in a sentence

• The technician adjusted the rooftop antenna to improve the television picture.

• The ant waved one antenna to follow the scent trail toward the food.

• A snapped antenna left the car radio crackling with static.

• Under the microscope the beetle's left antenna was clearly broken.

Where does antenna come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin antenna (also spelled antemna), which named the long horizontal yard or spar on a ship's mast that supported a sail. In the early 1600s, naturalists writing in Latin borrowed the term as a scientific label for the paired feelers on the heads of insects, picturing those slender projecting feelers as little ship's yards sticking out from the body. From there the word entered English biology with its delicate Latin plural, antennae. When wireless telegraphy and radio developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, engineers reused antenna for the metal rod or wire that sends and receives signals, and that newer technical sense usually takes the plain English plural antennas. The double n in the middle is the spelling trap, and it is faithfully inherited from the original Latin form.

How the word is built

• antenna (Latin: the yard of a ship, the spar that holds a sail)