Frequency

How to spell frequency

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce frequency

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frequency mean?

1. nounThe rate at which something happens or recurs over a period of time.
2. nounThe number of cycles or vibrations of a wave occurring per unit of time, as in sound or radio.

Frequency in a sentence

• The frequency of customer complaints dropped after the redesign.

• The station broadcasts on a low frequency that carries for miles.

• Increasing the frequency of backups protects against data loss.

• A higher frequency produces a higher pitch in the speaker.

Where does frequency come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin frequentia, meaning 'a crowd' or 'a large gathering', which was built on the adjective frequens, glossed as 'crowded', 'numerous', or 'happening often'. When it first entered English in the 1500s, it carried that older sense of a thronging multitude or a dense assembly of people. Over time the emphasis shifted from crowdedness in space to repetition in time, so that the word came to mean simply 'the rate at which something recurs'. By the nineteenth century scientists had borrowed it for the precise count of cycles or vibrations in a given period, the meaning now familiar from radio and sound. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed 'qu' followed by '-ency' tempts writers toward 'frequancy', but the '-ency' ending follows the same Latin pattern as 'agency' and 'urgency'.

How the word is built

• frequ- (from Latin frequens: crowded, repeated)
• -ency (noun suffix denoting state or quality)