Countdown

How to spell countdown

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce countdown

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does countdown mean?

1. nounThe act of counting backwards toward zero to mark the moment something begins, or the period of waiting that precedes an event.

Countdown in a sentence

• The launch countdown began ten seconds before the rocket fired.

• The office started a countdown to the project deadline on a whiteboard.

Where does countdown come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound built from two older pieces: the verb 'count', which English took from Old French conter and ultimately from the Latin computare meaning 'to reckon up' or 'to calculate', and the everyday adverb 'down', which is native English, descending from Old English dune, a worn-down form of of dune meaning 'off the hill' or 'downward'. The pairing describes the act of counting numbers in descending order, so that the figures fall toward zero. The word is genuinely young: it arose in the twentieth century, gaining wide currency with rocketry and broadcast launches in the 1950s, where a spoken sequence to zero marked the moment of ignition. Because it is a transparent compound of two familiar words, the spelling holds no foreign surprises; the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word, not two.

How the word is built

• count (to enumerate, from Latin computare)
• down (adverb, from Old English dune)