Incubator

How to spell incubator

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce incubator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does incubator mean?

1. nounA heated enclosed apparatus used to hatch eggs, to keep a premature baby warm, or to grow microbial cultures at a controlled temperature.
2. nounAn organisation that nurtures early-stage companies by providing workspace, funding, and mentoring.

Incubator in a sentence

• The premature infant spent three weeks in a hospital incubator.

• The tech incubator offers office space and seed funding to new startups.

• The farm uses an electric incubator to hatch its duck eggs.

• She pitched her app to a well-known startup incubator downtown.

Where does incubator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb incubare, meaning 'to lie upon' or 'to brood', formed from the prefix in- ('on, upon') and cubare ('to lie down'). A brooding hen literally lies upon her eggs to keep them warm, so the sense of hatching was there from the start. English took the Latin agent noun incubator, 'one who lies upon', and from the early 1800s used it for an apparatus that supplies steady warmth to hatch eggs. The medical sense, an enclosed cot that keeps a premature baby warm, followed later in the nineteenth century. The same cubare root also lies behind 'incubate', 'cubicle' (a small room to lie down in) and even 'concubine', and remembering that cub means 'lie' helps fix the spelling of the unstressed middle vowel.

How the word is built

• in- (on, upon)
• cub (lie, from Latin cubare 'to lie down')
• -ator (agent-noun suffix: a thing that does)