Battery

How to spell battery

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce battery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does battery mean?

1. nounA device that stores chemical energy and supplies it as electrical power.
2. nounA connected set or series of similar units, instruments, or tests.
3. nounThe unlawful physical striking or touching of another person.

Battery in a sentence

• The car would not start because the battery was completely flat.

• The clinic ran a full battery of blood tests before the surgery.

• He was charged with assault and battery after the brawl outside the pub.

• He kept a spare battery in the drawer for the smoke alarm.

• A battery of cameras lined the rooftop of the stadium.

• The lawyer explained that battery requires actual physical contact, not just a threat.

Where does battery come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the French batterie, a noun built on the verb battre, meaning 'to beat' or 'to strike', which itself descends from the Latin battuere, 'to beat'. It entered English in the 1500s first as a military term: a battery was a group of cannon arranged to beat down an enemy's defences, and the sense of an organised set still survives in phrases like 'a battery of tests'. The legal meaning, the unlawful beating or touching of another person, draws directly on that same idea of striking. The familiar electrical sense is the surprising late arrival; Benjamin Franklin borrowed the word in the 1740s for a connected group of charged glass jars (a Leyden 'battery'), comparing the linked array to a battery of guns, and it later stuck to the single power cell. The doubled t reflects the French battre and is the spelling worth fixing in memory, while the ending is -ery, not -ary.

How the word is built

• batter (from French battre: to beat/strike)
• -y (noun suffix denoting a collection or activity)