Ballast

How to spell ballast

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ballast

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ballast mean?

1. nounHeavy material placed low in a ship, balloon, or vehicle to keep it stable.
2. nounA device that limits or steadies the current flowing through a fluorescent or discharge lamp.

Ballast in a sentence

• The empty tanker took on water as ballast to ride lower in the swell.

• The flickering strip light needed a new ballast rather than a new tube.

• Crew released some ballast so the balloon could climb again.

• The electrician replaced the faulty ballast in the office ceiling fitting.

Where does ballast come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Ballast comes from a northern European seafaring vocabulary, most likely from a Low German or Scandinavian compound that joined a word meaning 'bare' to 'last', the old term for a load or burden. The literal sense was a 'bare load': heavy material such as gravel, sand, or stone carried purely for its weight rather than as cargo to be sold. The word entered English in the 1500s as English, Dutch, and Baltic sailors traded heavily across the North Sea, and it kept its practical meaning of weight added low in a vessel to keep it steady in the water. From the sea the term spread to other fields, so the crushed stone packed beneath railway tracks and the weight slung under a hot-air balloon both became 'ballast'. The double 'l' followed by a single 's' and the '-ast' ending are the spelling traps, since the word looks as though it might end in '-est' like an English superlative; remembering that the second half is 'last' (a load) helps keep the ending right.

How the word is built

• bal- (from bar: bare)
• last (load, burden)