Pathfinder

How to spell pathfinder

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pathfinder

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pathfinder mean?

1. nounA person who goes ahead to discover a route or to open up new territory or ideas.
2. nounA soldier or aircraft sent ahead to locate and mark a target or landing zone for those that follow.

Pathfinder in a sentence

• The early pathfinder mapped a safe trail through the mountain pass.

• The pathfinder dropped marker flares to guide the bombers to the target.

• She was a true pathfinder in cancer research, opening fields no one had explored.

• A small team led by a single pathfinder secured the landing zone before the main force arrived.

Where does pathfinder come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, built from two old native words: path and finder. Path traces back to the Old English paeth, meaning a track or way trodden by feet, a word shared across the West Germanic languages and related to the Dutch pad and German Pfad. Finder grows from the Old English findan, meaning to come upon or discover, with the agent suffix -er marking the person who does it. Joined together, pathfinder literally names someone who finds the way ahead, and the word came into common use in the nineteenth century, made famous in English by James Fenimore Cooper's 1840 frontier novel The Pathfinder. Because both halves are everyday words, the spelling holds no real surprises beyond remembering that it is written as a single unbroken word.

How the word is built

• path (a route or way)
• find (to discover)
• -er (one who does the action)