Frequencies

How to spell frequencies

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce frequencies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frequencies mean?

1. nounThe plural of frequency: the rates at which events or cycles repeat over a given period.

Frequencies in a sentence

• The radio scanner sweeps through hundreds of frequencies in a single second.

• The engineers compared the vibration frequencies of the two bridge designs.

Where does frequencies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'frequency', which traces back to the Latin word frequentia, meaning 'a crowd' or 'a gathering of many'. That noun grew from the adjective frequens, which described a place that was packed full or crowded, and by extension something that happened over and over. English adopted 'frequency' in the late 1500s, at first to mean a dense crowd or assembly, before the modern sense of 'how often something recurs' took hold in the 1600s. Scientists later seized on the word for the number of waves or cycles occurring in a unit of time, and that technical meaning now dominates in physics and radio. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unstressed '-quen-' hides an easily forgotten 'e', and the plural turns the 'y' into 'ies', which writers sometimes mangle.

How the word is built

• frequ- (from frequens: crowded, repeated)
• -ency (state/quality suffix)
• -ies (plural)