Motherboard

How to spell motherboard

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce motherboard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does motherboard mean?

1. nounThe main printed circuit board of a computer, into which the processor, memory and other components connect.

Motherboard in a sentence

• The technician replaced the faulty motherboard to get the desktop running again.

• All the memory modules slot directly into the motherboard.

Where does motherboard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern compound formed from two very old native English words. 'Mother' descends from the Old English modor, meaning a female parent, which in turn goes back to the same ancient Indo-European root that gave Latin mater and produced relatives across many European languages. 'Board' comes from Old English bord, which meant a plank or flat piece of wood, and later widened to mean any flat panel or surface. By the second half of the twentieth century 'board' had become standard in electronics for a flat panel carrying a circuit, and engineers coined 'motherboard' in the computing era of the 1960s and 1970s to name the main board into which smaller 'daughter' boards or cards could be plugged. The 'mother' part captures the idea of a central, parent component from which the rest of the system branches, mirroring the playful 'daughterboard' that plugs into it. Because both halves are ordinary English words, the only spelling trap is remembering it is written as one solid word, not two.

How the word is built

• mother (main, parent)
• board (flat panel or circuit board); a transparent compound noun