Fahrenheit
nounA temperature scale on which water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees, used chiefly in the United States.
How to spell fahrenheit
10 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce fahrenheit
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does fahrenheit mean?
- nounA temperature scale on which water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees, used chiefly in the United States.
Fahrenheit in a sentence
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The American weather report gave the figure in degrees fahrenheit.
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The oven dial was marked in fahrenheit rather than Celsius.
Where does fahrenheit come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word is an eponym: it preserves the surname of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German physicist born in Danzig (now Gdansk) in 1686, who built the first reliable mercury thermometer and proposed the temperature scale that still bears his name in 1724. The surname itself is German, and in its parts it suggests something like 'experience of travel' or a journey, from 'fahren' meaning 'to travel or to drive' and 'heit', a noun-forming ending equivalent to the English '-hood' that signals a state or condition. English adopted the word in the 1700s simply by attaching the inventor's name to his scale, so unlike most English words it never passed through Latin or French. The spelling trap comes straight from its German roots: the silent 'h' after the 'a' (the 'fahr' element) and the 'ei' vowel pair, which follows German spelling order rather than the English 'ie' habit. Remembering that it is a person's name, kept whole and unchanged, is the surest way to get the awkward letters in the right places.
How the word is built
- Fahrenheit (surname of the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit), used as an eponymous unit name
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