Headphones

How to spell headphones

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce headphones

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does headphones mean?

1. nounA pair of small speakers worn over or in the ears for listening privately to audio.

Headphones in a sentence

• She put on her headphones to block out the noise of the open-plan office.

• The noise-cancelling headphones made the long flight far more bearable.

Where does headphones come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a compound built from two familiar pieces. The first element is the native English word 'head', which traces back to Old English 'heafod', meaning the top part of the body. The second is 'phone', a shortened form lifted from words like 'telephone' and 'microphone'; it comes from the Greek 'phone', which literally meant 'sound' or 'voice'. The compound emerged in the early twentieth century as a practical name for sound-producing devices worn over or on the head, originally for radio operators and telephone exchanges. Because both parts are very ordinary and the spelling is fully phonetic, the word carries no real trap; the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single solid word, not as two.

How the word is built

• head (the head)
• phone (from Greek phone: sound, voice)
• -s (plural suffix)