Fuse

How to spell fuse

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fuse

What does fuse mean?

1. verbTo join or blend two or more things into a single whole, often by melting.
2. nounA safety device containing a strip of metal that melts to break an electrical circuit when the current is too high.
3. nounA length of cord or a device that carries a flame or signal to detonate an explosive.

Fuse in a sentence

• verb

  Intense heat can fuse the two metal parts into one piece.

• noun

  The kettle stopped working because the fuse in its plug had blown.

• noun

  The miners lit the fuse and retreated to a safe distance.

• verb

  The designers wanted to fuse traditional craft with modern technology.

• noun

  He kept a spare fuse in the kitchen drawer for emergencies.

• noun

  A damp fuse failed to set off the firework.

Where does fuse come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This small word actually carries two strands of ancestry, both reaching back to Latin. The verb sense, meaning to melt or blend together, comes from the Latin fundere, whose past participle was fusus, literally 'poured' or 'melted'; the same root gives us 'foundry' and 'infuse', which is a useful clue that fuse is about things flowing into one. The noun sense, meaning a cord or tube that carries fire to an explosive, travelled instead through the Italian fuso, from the Latin fusus meaning 'spindle', so named because the early igniting tubes resembled the slim spindle used in spinning. The two meanings drifted together in English from the 1640s onward, and the familiar electrical fuse, a thin strip designed to melt and break a circuit, neatly unites both ideas of melting and protection. Because the word is short and the spelling is regular, the main thing to remember is the silent final -e and that it is spelled with an s, not the variant 'fuze' sometimes seen on military hardware.

How the word is built

• fus- (from Latin fundere/fusus: to pour, to melt)
• -e