Flashlight

How to spell flashlight

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce flashlight

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does flashlight mean?

1. nounA small battery-powered portable lamp held in the hand to direct a beam of light.

Flashlight in a sentence

• She kept a flashlight in the glovebox for roadside emergencies.

• The campers used a flashlight to find the path back to the tent.

Where does flashlight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flashlight is a transparent compound built from two old English elements. The first part, flash, appeared in Middle English as a verb meaning to splash or dash water about, and by the 1500s it had shifted to describe a sudden brief burst of light, the sense kept in 'a flash of lightning'. The second part, light, descends from Old English 'leoht', a word for brightness or illumination shared across the Germanic languages. The two were joined in the late nineteenth century, around the 1890s, to name the new battery-powered portable lamp invented in the United States; the device was called a flashlight because early dry cells could not sustain a steady beam and worked best in short flashes. In British English the same object is usually called a torch, but the compound flashlight is spelled the same wherever it is used, so the only thing to remember is that it is one solid word with no gap or hyphen.

How the word is built

• flash (sudden burst of light)
• light (illumination)