Neon

How to spell neon

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce neon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does neon mean?

1. nounA colourless, odourless inert gas that glows reddish-orange when an electric current passes through it.
2. adjectiveExtremely bright and vivid, like the glow of an illuminated gas tube.

Neon in a sentence

• noun

  Neon is one of the noble gases on the periodic table.

• adjective

  She wore a neon green jacket that was visible from across the car park.

• noun

  The sign glowed because an electric current excited the neon inside the tube.

• adjective

  The gym handed out neon pink wristbands to every member.

Where does neon come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Neon comes from the Greek word neon, the neuter form of neos, which simply meant 'new'. The gas was discovered in 1898 by the British chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers, who isolated it from liquefied air. According to the story, Ramsay's young son suggested the Latin novum for 'new', but his father preferred the Greek equivalent and settled on neon, fitting the pattern of the other noble gases like argon and krypton. The element took its name because it was a genuinely new substance never before identified. Within a couple of decades the word also became famous for the glowing advertising tubes invented by Georges Claude, so neon now suggests bright light as readily as it names a gas. The same neos root survives in everyday words such as 'neophyte', literally a newly planted person, which helps fix the spelling with neo- at the front.

How the word is built

• neo- (new, from Greek neos)
• -on (noun suffix used for the inert gases)