Fuselage

How to spell fuselage

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce fuselage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fuselage mean?

1. nounThe main body of an aircraft, which holds the crew, passengers, and cargo.

Fuselage in a sentence

• The engineers inspected the fuselage for cracks before the flight.

• A long crack ran along the underside of the fuselage.

Where does fuselage come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English directly from French in the early twentieth century, just as powered flight was being invented. The French fuselage was built on the adjective fuselé, meaning 'shaped like a spindle' or 'tapered at both ends', which itself traces back to Old French fusel, a small spindle, the rod on which thread is wound. Behind all of these lies the Latin fusus, the ordinary word for a spindle. The metaphor is neat and worth remembering: an early aircraft body, narrow at the nose and tail and broader in the middle, really does resemble a spindle, and that spindle image is exactly why the spelling keeps the French 's' (fusel) rather than the 'z' sound many English speakers hear. The word arrived in English around 1909, when the new vocabulary of aviation was borrowing heavily from French aeronautical engineers.

How the word is built

• fusel- (from French fuselé: spindle-shaped, from Latin fusus: spindle)
• -age (noun suffix denoting a collective body or structure)