Microphone

How to spell microphone

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce microphone

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does microphone mean?

1. nounA device that converts sound, especially speech, into an electrical signal for recording or amplification.

Microphone in a sentence

• The speaker tapped the microphone to check that it was working.

• A clip-on microphone left both of her hands free during the demonstration.

Where does microphone come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word microphone is built from two Greek elements: mikros, meaning 'small', and phone, meaning 'sound' or 'voice', so the literal sense is something like 'small sound'. It was first coined in the early 1800s to describe a device intended to amplify faint sounds, a sibling of the older word megaphone, which pairs the same phone with megas 'great'. The familiar electrical microphone, the instrument that converts speech into an electrical signal, was developed and named later in the nineteenth century during the rise of the telephone and the telegraph. The phon root is the same one that runs through telephone, phonics, and symphony, all of which deal with sound. Because that root is spelled with 'ph' rather than 'f', the spelling trap lies in remembering the Greek 'ph', and in the unstressed middle vowel of 'micro'.

How the word is built

• micro- (small)
• phon (sound/voice)
• -e (noun ending from Greek)