Output

How to spell output

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce output

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does output mean?

1. nounThe amount of something produced by a person, machine, or process.
2. verbTo produce or deliver data, power, or goods.

Output in a sentence

• noun

  The factory's monthly output rose sharply after the new line opened.

• verb

  The script will output the results to a separate file.

• noun

  The report compared the output of each regional team.

• verb

  The generator can output enough power for the whole site.

Where does output come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Output is a native English compound, formed straightforwardly from the old preposition and adverb 'out', meaning 'forth' or 'beyond', and the verb 'put', meaning 'to place or set'. Both halves descend from Old English: 'ut' (out) and the late Old English 'putian' (to push or thrust). The combination first appears in the early 1800s, originally describing the quantity of coal, ore, or goods that a mine or factory 'put out', that is, produced in a given period. From that industrial sense it broadened to mean any product of an activity, and in the twentieth century it was readily adopted by electronics and computing for the data or signal a system sends out, mirrored by its natural opposite 'input'. Because it is a transparent compound of two familiar everyday words, the spelling rarely causes trouble; the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word with no hyphen.

How the word is built

• out- (forth, beyond)
• put (to place, set)