Malfunction

How to spell malfunction

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce malfunction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does malfunction mean?

1. verbTo fail to operate or work in the normal or intended way.
2. nounA failure of a device, system, or process to work correctly.

Malfunction in a sentence

• verb

  The printer began to malfunction halfway through the report.

• noun

  The flight was delayed by a malfunction in the navigation equipment.

• verb

  Engineers feared the cooling system might malfunction under heavy load.

• noun

  A software malfunction wiped out the morning's transactions.

Where does malfunction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a compound of the prefix mal-, which comes from the Latin malus meaning 'bad' or 'evil', and the noun function, which descends from the Latin functio, meaning 'a performance' or 'an execution of a task', itself from fungi, 'to perform or discharge a duty'. The prefix mal- travelled into English through Old French, where it routinely marked something done badly or wrongly, as in 'malice' and 'maltreat'. Function entered English in the 1500s as a term for the proper working or purpose of a thing, and by the twentieth century, with machines and electronics everywhere, the need arose to describe equipment that failed to work as intended. Malfunction was coined in the mid-1900s, largely in American technical and aerospace contexts, joining the 'bad' prefix to 'function' to mean exactly that: a failure to operate correctly. The spelling trap is the single l (mal-, not 'mall-') and the silent-looking 'ct' cluster carried over from function.

How the word is built

• mal- (bad, faulty)
• function (from Latin functio: performance, execution)