Batteries

How to spell batteries

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce batteries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does batteries mean?

1. nounPortable devices that store and supply electrical power (plural of battery).
2. nounGroups or arrays of similar things, such as artillery guns or a series of tests.

Batteries in a sentence

• The remote stopped working because both batteries were dead.

• The candidates faced whole batteries of psychometric tests before the interview.

• He keeps a drawer of spare batteries for the smoke alarms.

• Coastal batteries of guns once defended the harbour entrance.

Where does batteries come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the plural of 'battery', a word that came into English from the French batterie, meaning 'a beating' or 'a striking'. The French noun was built on the verb battre 'to beat', which descends from the Latin battuere 'to beat or strike'. The original English senses were all about beating: a battery was first an assault (the 'assault and battery' of law) and then a grouped set of artillery that pounded the enemy. From that idea of a connected set or array, scientists in the 1700s borrowed the word for a linked group of electrical cells, and that is the everyday meaning today. The spelling trap lives in the middle and end: the doubled 't' from battre, the unstressed 'er' that sounds like a vague schwa, and the plural that turns the 'y' into '-ies'.

How the word is built

• batter- (from French batterie: a beating, a row of guns)
• -ies (plural of words ending in -y)