Downloadable

How to spell downloadable

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce downloadable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does downloadable mean?

1. adjectiveAble to be transferred from a remote system, server, or website onto a local device.

Downloadable in a sentence

• The museum offers a downloadable guide for visitors to use on their phones.

• Every receipt is available as a downloadable file in the account settings.

Where does downloadable come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly modern word built from very old parts. The first element, 'down', comes from the Old English dūne, meaning 'downward' or 'off a height', while 'load' descends from the Old English lād, which originally meant a way, a journey, or the act of carrying something along it. The verb 'to download' was coined in the computing age of the 1970s to describe moving data 'down' from a central or remote system to a local one, the opposite of 'upload'. Adding the productive suffix '-able', meaning 'capable of being', gave us 'downloadable', describing any file or content that can be fetched in this way. Because the word stacks 'down' and 'load' before the suffix, the spelling trap is the doubled meeting point: keep the single 'n', the 'load' intact, and remember that '-able' (not '-ible') is the ending here.

How the word is built

• down (Old English dūn: down, off)
• load (Old English lād: way, carrying)
• -able (capable of being)