Radar
nounA system that uses radio waves to detect the position, distance, and speed of objects such as aircraft, ships, or vehicles.
How to spell radar
5 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce radar
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does radar mean?
- nounA system that uses radio waves to detect the position, distance, and speed of objects such as aircraft, ships, or vehicles.
Radar in a sentence
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The control tower tracked the incoming flight on radar.
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A speeding driver was caught by the police radar on the motorway.
Where does radar come from?
Language of origin: Other
Radar is an acronym coined in the United States during the early 1940s from the phrase 'radio detection and ranging', a method of bouncing radio waves off a distant object to learn its position, distance, and speed. British engineers had been developing the same technology under the earlier name 'radio direction finding', sometimes shortened to RDF, but the snappier American coinage quickly won out across the English-speaking world. Each letter stands for a word, yet the term was deliberately built to be pronounced and spelled as an ordinary word, which is why we no longer write it in capitals. It is also a palindrome, reading the same forwards and backwards, a small detail that helpfully fixes its tidy symmetric spelling in the mind. From its wartime military origins it spread rapidly into civilian aviation, shipping, weather forecasting, and policing of road speeds.
How the word is built
- acronym from RA(dio) D(etection) A(nd) R(anging); now treated as a single root word
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