Outage

How to spell outage

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce outage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outage mean?

1. nounA period during which a power, water, or communications supply is interrupted or unavailable.

Outage in a sentence

• The storm caused a four-hour power outage across the whole village.

• The bank apologised for the online banking outage that locked customers out all morning.

Where does outage come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Outage is a fairly modern formation built on the everyday English word 'out', which descends directly from the Old English 'ut', meaning 'outside' or 'away'. To this native root was added the suffix '-age', a productive ending that English absorbed through Old French from the Latin '-aticum'; it forms nouns expressing a state, an amount, or the result of an action, as in 'shortage', 'leakage', and 'breakage'. The word first appeared in American technical and commercial writing in the later nineteenth century, originally describing the quantity of goods lost in transit or storage, that is, the part that went 'out' of the count. From there it shifted in the early twentieth century to its now-dominant sense of a period when an electrical, water, or communications supply is cut off. The spelling trap is the silent 'e' before the soft 'g': writers know the word from speech and can forget that '-age', not '-aje' or '-edge', supplies the ending.

How the word is built

• out (Old English ut: outside, away)
• -age (noun suffix denoting a state, amount, or result)