Buffer

How to spell buffer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce buffer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does buffer mean?

1. nounSomething that lessens the impact between two things or shields one from another.
2. nounA temporary area of memory used to hold data while it moves between two parts of a system.
3. verbTo lessen or absorb the effect of something harmful or jarring.

Buffer in a sentence

• noun

  A strip of woodland acts as a buffer between the houses and the motorway.

• noun

  The video kept pausing because the streaming buffer could not fill quickly enough.

• verb

  The thick padding should buffer the laptop against any knocks in transit.

• noun

  The savings account gives the family a financial buffer against sudden bills.

• noun

  The program copied the file into a buffer before writing it to the disk.

• verb

  Government grants can buffer small firms from the worst of a downturn.

Where does buffer come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grows out of the older verb 'buff', meaning to deaden or soften the force of a blow, which English took from the Old French 'buffe', a word for a blow or a slap to the face. That French term was imitative in origin, echoing the dull sound of an impact, the same root that gives us 'buffet' in the sense of being knocked about by wind or waves. By the early nineteenth century 'buffer' had attached itself to the spring-loaded pads fitted to the ends of railway carriages to absorb the shock when they bumped together. From that very physical idea of a shock-absorbing device, the sense widened to mean anything that softens a collision, whether a person, a stretch of neutral territory, or a financial reserve. In the twentieth century chemistry borrowed it for a solution that resists changes in acidity, and computing borrowed it again for a temporary store that smooths the flow of data between two parts of a system. The single 'f' becoming double and the plain '-er' ending make the spelling easy, though writers sometimes pause over whether it doubles the consonant at all.

How the word is built

• buff (to deaden a blow)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: a thing that does)