Orbital

How to spell orbital

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce orbital

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does orbital mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the curved path of an object as it revolves around another, such as a planet or satellite.
2. nounA region around an atomic nucleus in which an electron is most likely to be found.
3. nounA motorway or ring road that encircles a city.

Orbital in a sentence

• adjective

  Engineers adjusted the satellite's orbital speed before the next pass.

• noun

  The diagram showed two electrons sharing a single orbital.

• noun

  Traffic on the orbital was at a standstill during the morning commute.

• adjective

  The spacecraft reached its orbital position above the equator.

• noun

  Chemistry students learn how each orbital holds a limited number of electrons.

• noun

  She joined the orbital to avoid driving through the city centre.

Where does orbital come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows out of the Latin orbita, meaning the rut or track left by a wheel, and that noun in turn came from orbis, which meant a ring, a circle, or a disc. Astronomers of the seventeenth century borrowed orbit to describe the curved path one body traces around another, picturing it as a kind of circular track in the sky. The adjective orbital, formed by adding the familiar Latin-derived suffix -al, appeared later to describe anything relating to such a path. Over time the word travelled into very different fields: anatomists use it for the bony socket around the eye, and physicists adopted it in the early twentieth century for the region around an atomic nucleus where an electron is likely to be found. The shared sense of a circle or enclosing ring, present all the way back in orbis, is the thread that ties these uses together and explains the single soft -bit- in the middle.

How the word is built

• orbit (from Latin orbita: a wheel track or course)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)