Celsius

How to spell celsius

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce celsius

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does celsius mean?

1. nounA scale of temperature on which water freezes at zero degrees and boils at one hundred degrees at standard pressure.

Celsius in a sentence

• The forecast said the afternoon would reach thirty degrees celsius.

• The recipe asks for an oven set to one hundred and eighty degrees celsius.

Where does celsius come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is not built from ordinary roots at all; it is the surname of Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer who lived from 1701 to 1744. In 1742 he proposed a temperature scale based on the freezing and boiling points of water, although his original version ran the opposite way, with zero at boiling and one hundred at freezing; the scale was later inverted to the familiar order we use today. For a long time the scale was called 'centigrade', from the Latin centum meaning 'hundred' and gradus meaning 'step' or 'degree', because it divides the range into a hundred steps. In 1948 an international conference formally renamed it 'Celsius' in his honour, which is why the word is capitalised in his name even though it now functions as an ordinary unit. The spelling trap is the quiet 'si' in the middle, pronounced 'see', plus the fact that English speakers want to write the soft sound after the first 's' with a 'c', so the surname's original Latinate look is easy to garble.

How the word is built

• Celsius (surname of Anders Celsius) used as a unit name