Refrigeration

How to spell refrigeration

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce refrigeration

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does refrigeration mean?

1. nounThe process of cooling food or other items, or keeping them cold, to preserve them or lower their temperature.

Refrigeration in a sentence

• The fresh fish needs refrigeration to stay safe during the long journey.

• A power cut knocked out the refrigeration in the entire warehouse.

Where does refrigeration come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb refrigerare, meaning 'to make cool again' or 'to cool down', which was built from the prefix re- (here meaning 'back' or 'again') and frigus, the Latin word for 'cold' or 'coolness'. The related verb frigere meant 'to be cold', and the same root sits inside the modern English adjective 'frigid'. The noun form refrigeratio described the act or process of cooling, and English took it on through scholarly and scientific writing, with 'refrigeration' recorded from the 1500s, long before mechanical cooling existed. For centuries it simply meant making something cooler or relieving heat; only in the nineteenth century, as ice-making and cold-storage machinery developed, did it settle into its now familiar industrial sense. The tricky spelling comes straight from the Latin frigus: the 'frig' stays put with a single 'g' and the unstressed middle vowels are easy to drop.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• friger- (from Latin frigus: cold)
• -ation (noun of process)