Firepower

How to spell firepower

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce firepower

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does firepower mean?

1. nounThe destructive capacity of guns, missiles, or armed forces, measured by the volume and effect of fire they can deliver.
2. nounThe combined strength, resources, or talent that a group can bring to bear on a task.

Firepower in a sentence

• The artillery battalion gave the advance significant firepower.

• The legal team added serious firepower ahead of the trial.

• The new frigate carries more firepower than the ship it replaced.

• The marketing department lacked the firepower to launch in three countries at once.

Where does firepower come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound joining two very old words. The first half, fire, descends from the Old English fyr, a native Germanic word for flame and burning that has cousins across the Germanic languages. The second half, power, came into English in the 1200s from the Old French poeir, itself rooted in the Latin posse, meaning 'to be able'. The two were welded together in the modern sense during the era of organised gunnery, when commanders needed a single word for the volume of shot a unit could deliver; the earliest uses cluster in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because both halves are everyday words, the only real spelling point is remembering it is written as one solid word, with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• fire (from Old English fyr: fire)
• power (capacity to act, from Latin posse via Old French)