Burner

How to spell burner

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce burner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does burner mean?

1. nounThe part of a stove, lamp, or furnace where the flame or heat is produced.
2. nounA cheap, prepaid mobile phone meant to be used briefly and then discarded.

Burner in a sentence

• She moved the pot to the back burner to keep it warm.

• The detective traced the calls to a cheap burner bought with cash.

• The gas burner would not light until he cleaned the jets.

• He kept a spare burner so his real number stayed private.

Where does burner come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word is built on the native English verb 'burn', which comes from Old English; two related verbs sat side by side in the early language, 'beornan' meaning 'to be on fire' and 'bærnan' meaning 'to set on fire', and over time they merged into the single modern verb. These had Germanic relatives, including the German 'brennen', and ultimately go back to a Proto-Germanic root meaning to blaze or to consume with flame. The agent and instrument ending '-er', also of native Germanic stock, turns a verb into 'the person or thing that performs the action', so a burner is literally 'something that burns'. The word has long named the part of a lamp, stove, or furnace where the flame is produced, and in recent decades it picked up the slang sense of a cheap, disposable phone, the idea being a device you 'burn' or throw away after brief use. The plain spelling holds few surprises, which keeps it an easy word to write.

How the word is built

• burn (Old English root: to be on fire, to consume by fire)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: the thing that does the action)