Headphone

How to spell headphone

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce headphone

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does headphone mean?

1. nounA small speaker, usually one of a pair, worn on or over the ear to listen privately to audio.

Headphone in a sentence

• One headphone stopped working halfway through the flight.

• She traced the fault to a loose wire inside the left headphone.

Where does headphone come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern English compound that joins two very old elements. The first, 'head', is native Old English 'heafod', the part of the body the device sits on. The second, 'phone', comes from the Greek 'phone', meaning 'sound' or 'voice', the same root that gives us 'telephone', 'microphone' and 'phonics'. The word was coined in the early twentieth century, around the 1910s, when early radio and telephone operators wore listening sets clamped over the head. Because the spelling is simply 'head' plus 'phone', the trap is purely the 'ph' that spells the /f/ sound, a giveaway of the Greek ancestry behind the second half.

How the word is built

• head (the upper part worn on)
• phone (from Greek phone: sound or voice)