Cylinder

How to spell cylinder

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cylinder

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cylinder mean?

1. nounA solid or hollow object with straight sides and circular ends, like a tube or tin.

Cylinder in a sentence

• The diver checked the air cylinder before the dive.

• A tin of soup is shaped like a perfect cylinder.

Where does cylinder come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek kylindros, meaning a roller or something rolled, which came from the verb kylindein, 'to roll'. The Greek term passed into Latin as cylindrus, keeping the sense of a long round body that could roll along the ground. English picked it up in the late 1500s, partly through French and partly straight from the Latin, to name the familiar tube-shaped solid in geometry. Over time it spread to mechanical objects with that same shape, such as the cylinder of an engine or a gas cylinder. The tricky spelling is a direct fossil of its Greek roots: the first vowel is a 'y' rather than an 'i', and the unstressed middle syllable hides a faint schwa that tempts writers to drop or swap a letter.

How the word is built

• cylind- (from Greek kylindros: roller, roll)
• -er (noun-forming ending, reshaped in English)