Blockchain
nounA shared digital ledger in which records are stored in linked blocks that cannot easily be altered after the fact.
How to spell blockchain
10 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce blockchain
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does blockchain mean?
- nounA shared digital ledger in which records are stored in linked blocks that cannot easily be altered after the fact.
Blockchain in a sentence
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The company moved its supply records onto a blockchain to make them harder to tamper with.
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Every cryptocurrency transaction is logged permanently on the blockchain.
Where does blockchain come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Blockchain is a modern compound formed from two much older English words, 'block' and 'chain'. 'Block' arrived in late Middle English from the Old French 'bloc', itself drawn from Middle Dutch 'blok', meaning a solid lump or log of wood. 'Chain' came through Old French 'chaeine' from the Latin 'catena', which literally meant a series of connected metal links. The compound was coined in the wake of the 2008 Bitcoin paper to describe a digital ledger in which batches of transactions (the blocks) are cryptographically linked one after another (the chain), so that each new block points back to the one before it. The spelling is mercifully transparent: it is simply the two everyday words joined with no letters lost, which is the easiest detail to hold onto when writing it.
How the word is built
- block (a solid piece, here a grouped set of records)
- chain (a connected sequence)
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