Microscopy

How to spell microscopy

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce microscopy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does microscopy mean?

1. nounThe use of microscopes to view objects too small to be seen by the naked eye, or the scientific field concerned with this.

Microscopy in a sentence

• The lab introduced a new course in electron microscopy this term.

• Fluorescence microscopy let the team track individual proteins inside the cell.

Where does microscopy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Microscopy is built from two Greek elements: mikros, meaning 'small', and skopein, meaning 'to look at' or 'to examine closely'. The same skopein root gives us a whole family of viewing words, including telescope (from tele, 'far off') and periscope (from peri, 'around'), so the spelling trap really lives in the unstressed middle. English assembled microscopy in the seventeenth century, soon after the instrument itself was developed and the noun microscope appeared around the 1650s; the field name simply added the activity suffix -y. The early microscopists, such as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke, used these new lenses to reveal a previously invisible world of cells and tiny organisms, and Hooke's 1665 book Micrographia popularised the wonder of looking at the very small. Because the word is stressed on the second syllable (mi-CROS-co-py), the vowels on either side of the s reduce to a faint schwa, which is exactly why writers can hesitate over the -scop- spelling.

How the word is built

• micro- (from Greek mikros: small)
• -scop- (from Greek skopein: to look at, examine)
• -y (noun suffix denoting an activity or field)