Lander

How to spell lander

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lander

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lander mean?

1. nounA spacecraft designed to descend onto and rest on the surface of a planet, moon, or other body.

Lander in a sentence

• The lander touched down gently on the lunar surface after a tense descent.

• Engineers lost contact with the lander moments before it reached the Martian plain.

Where does lander come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern compound built from the everyday English word 'land' plus the agent ending '-er', which marks a person or thing that performs an action. 'Land' itself is one of the oldest words in the language, descending from Old English 'land' meaning solid ground or a defined territory, and it has close cousins across the Germanic family, including German 'Land' and Dutch 'land'. The verb 'to land', meaning to bring to ground or to come down onto a surface, grew naturally out of that noun. When the space age arrived in the twentieth century, engineers needed a name for a craft designed to touch down on the Moon or a planet, and 'lander' was coined on the simple, transparent pattern of 'a thing that lands'. Because every part of the word is plainly visible, the only spelling caution is remembering the single 'd' before the '-er' rather than doubling it.

How the word is built

• land (ground, solid earth)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: a thing that lands)