Conveyor

How to spell conveyor

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce conveyor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does conveyor mean?

1. nounA continuous moving belt or system that transports objects from one place to another.

Conveyor in a sentence

• The parcels travelled along the conveyor to the loading dock.

• A fault on the conveyor halted the entire production line.

Where does conveyor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends ultimately from the Latin via, meaning 'way' or 'road', combined with the prefix com-, meaning 'together'. In Old French this became conveier, which meant to accompany or escort someone along a road, and English borrowed the verb 'convey' in the 1300s with that same sense of carrying or escorting. Over time 'convey' broadened to mean transporting goods, transferring property, and even communicating ideas. The noun 'conveyor' was formed by adding the agent suffix '-or', and from the nineteenth century onward it attached firmly to the moving belt machinery of factories and warehouses. The spelling trap lives in that ending: it takes '-or' rather than the more common '-er', a leftover habit of agent nouns built on Latin roots.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• vey (from Latin via: way, road)
• -or (agent suffix: thing that does)