Ether

How to spell ether

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ether

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ether mean?

1. nounA light, volatile, flammable liquid once widely used as a solvent and as a surgical anaesthetic.
2. nounThe hypothetical invisible medium once believed to fill space, or, figuratively, the air through which broadcasts travel.

Ether in a sentence

• The surgeon in the old account dripped ether onto a cloth to put the patient to sleep.

• Nineteenth-century physicists argued that light needed a medium they called the ether.

• The laboratory stored the highly flammable ether well away from any open flame.

• Her voice went out across the ether to thousands of radio listeners.

Where does ether come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word descends from the Greek aithēr, the name for the pure, bright upper air that the ancients believed lay above the ordinary atmosphere and surrounded the gods. That noun was built on the verb aithein, meaning 'to burn' or 'to shine', so the literal idea was of glowing, luminous air rather than the murky stuff we breathe at ground level. It passed into Latin as aether and reached English in the late 1300s, at first keeping the poetic sense of the heavens or the rarefied sky. Physicists later borrowed it for the invisible medium that was once thought to fill space and carry light, the so-called luminiferous ether, an idea finally discarded after experiments around 1900. Chemists, meanwhile, attached the same name in the 1700s to a class of light, volatile, sweet-smelling liquids, especially the anaesthetic once used in surgery. The trap in the spelling is the unstressed second syllable and the 'th', since the word sounds simpler than it looks.

How the word is built

• ether (from Greek aithēr: the bright upper air, from aithein 'to burn, shine')