Newton

How to spell newton

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce newton

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does newton mean?

1. nounThe SI unit of force, equal to the force required to accelerate one kilogram of mass at one metre per second squared.

Newton in a sentence

• The engineering report recorded the cable tension as one newton at the test point.

• A force of one newton will accelerate a one-kilogram mass at one metre per second squared.

Where does newton come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The newton is a unit of force in the International System of Units (SI), and it takes its name directly from the English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642 to 1727), whose laws of motion describe how force relates to mass and acceleration. The surname itself is an ordinary English place name meaning 'new town', from the Old English niwe ('new') and tun ('enclosure, settlement, town'), the same tun that survives in countless English town names. When scientists formalised the SI system in the twentieth century, they followed the convention of honouring great researchers by naming units after them, and the unit of force was officially given Newton's name by the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1948. A small but important spelling and style point follows from that history: although it commemorates a person, the unit is written with a lowercase 'n' when it names the quantity, while its symbol is the capital letter N. One newton is defined as the force needed to accelerate one kilogram of mass at one metre per second squared, a tidy summary of Newton's own second law.

How the word is built

• Newton (surname of Sir Isaac Newton) used as an eponymous unit name; no internal prefix or suffix