Drone

How to spell drone

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drone

What does drone mean?

1. nounA pilotless aircraft that is operated by remote control or flown autonomously.
2. nounA male honeybee whose role is to mate with the queen and which does not gather nectar.
3. verbTo make a continuous low humming sound, or to talk in a dull, monotonous way.

Drone in a sentence

• noun

  The surveyor used a drone to photograph the rooftop from above.

• noun

  The beekeeper explained that a drone has no sting and cannot collect pollen.

• verb

  The old refrigerator would drone all night in the quiet kitchen.

• noun

  New rules require pilots to register every drone that weighs over a certain limit.

• noun

  In autumn the workers expel every drone from the hive to save food.

• verb

  The lecturer tended to drone on about figures until the room lost interest.

Where does drone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English drān, meaning the male honeybee, the stingless bee that does no work and merely mates with the queen. It belongs to a wider Germanic family that includes the Low German drone and Dutch dar, and scholars link these forms to the deep, droning buzz that the male bee makes in flight. Because the male bee was seen as idle, living off the labour of the workers, drone gained the figurative sense of a lazy person who sponges off others by the 1500s. The steady humming sound of the insect also gave us the verb 'to drone', meaning to make a low continuous noise or to speak in a dull monotone. In the twentieth century the word was borrowed for pilotless aircraft, reportedly because early radio-controlled target planes hummed like a bee, and that meaning now dominates everyday use.

How the word is built

• drone (from Old English drān: a male honeybee), a single native root with no prefix or suffix