Combustion

How to spell combustion

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce combustion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does combustion mean?

1. nounThe process of burning, in which a fuel reacts rapidly with oxygen to release heat and light.

Combustion in a sentence

• The engineer studied how fuel and air mix to produce efficient combustion.

• Incomplete combustion in the old boiler released dangerous carbon monoxide.

Where does combustion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb comburere, meaning 'to burn up completely', which was formed from the intensifying prefix com- and urere, meaning simply 'to burn'. From that verb came the noun combustionem, describing the act of burning, and the spelling already carried the curious intrusive 'b' that has no real root meaning but was added in Latin and stuck. English took the word in the late fourteenth century by way of Old French combustion, at first in medical and alchemical writing about heat and burning. Over the centuries it narrowed toward its modern chemical and mechanical sense: the rapid reaction of a fuel with oxygen that releases heat and light. The same urere root that means 'to burn' also lies hidden inside related Latin-derived words, and remembering that the core idea is 'burning' helps fix the unusual 'bust' chunk in the spelling.

How the word is built

• com- (intensive, completely)
• ust (burnt, from Latin urere 'to burn')
• -ion (noun of process)