Bandwidth

How to spell bandwidth

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bandwidth

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bandwidth mean?

1. nounThe amount of data that can be transmitted over a network in a given time, or the range of frequencies a signal occupies.
2. nounThe time, attention, or mental energy a person has available to take on something.

Bandwidth in a sentence

• Streaming video in high definition eats up a lot of bandwidth.

• I simply do not have the bandwidth to take on another project this month.

• The office upgraded its broadband to get more bandwidth for video calls.

• After caring for two toddlers all day, she had no bandwidth left for chores.

Where does bandwidth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bandwidth is a transparent English compound, joining 'band' and 'width', and both halves trace back to Old roots. 'Band', in the sense of a range or strip, came into English from Old French 'bande' (a flat strip or band), which itself goes back to a Germanic root meaning something that binds or ties together; the same family gives us the word 'bind'. 'Width' is the native English noun formed from 'wide', an Old English adjective ('wid') meaning broad or extensive, with the noun-forming '-th' ending also seen in 'length' and 'depth'. The technical term was coined in early twentieth-century electronics to describe the range, or 'band', of frequencies a signal occupies, the difference between its highest and lowest frequency. From there it spread to computing and networks to mean data-carrying capacity, and by the late 1900s it had jumped into office speech as a figurative measure of a person's spare time, attention, or mental energy.

How the word is built

• band (a range or strip)
• width (the measure of how wide something is)