Charger

How to spell charger

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce charger

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does charger mean?

1. nounA device that supplies electrical power to refill a battery.
2. nounA strong horse ridden into battle by a soldier.

Charger in a sentence

• The phone died because she had left her charger at the office.

• The knight mounted his armoured charger before the tournament began.

• Every airport seat now has a built-in charger for laptops and phones.

• The cavalry officer trained his charger to stay calm amid gunfire.

Where does charger come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Latin carrus, a Celtic-derived term for a wheeled wagon, which gave Late Latin the verb carricare, meaning 'to load' or 'to fill up'. That verb passed into Old French as chargier, 'to load' or 'to burden', and English took it as 'charge' during the 1200s. The agent suffix -er was then added to mean 'something that charges', a pattern English uses freely. Over the centuries the noun fanned out into surprisingly different objects: a powerful horse trained to carry the weight of an armed rider, a large serving dish that was 'loaded' with food, and, most recently, the electrical device that fills a battery. The same carricare root also sits inside the everyday words 'cargo', 'car', and 'carriage', all carrying the original idea of loading and hauling.

How the word is built

• charge (to load/fill, from Late Latin carricare)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: a thing that charges)