Refrigerator

How to spell refrigerator

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce refrigerator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does refrigerator mean?

1. nounAn insulated cabinet or appliance kept cold to preserve food and drink.

Refrigerator in a sentence

• She stocked the refrigerator with milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables.

• The leftover curry will keep in the refrigerator for three days.

Where does refrigerator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb refrigerare, meaning 'to make cold again' or 'to cool down', which was formed from the prefix re- together with frigus, the Latin noun for 'cold' or 'frost'. The agent noun 'refrigerator' was coined in English in the early 1600s to describe anything that cooled things, long before electric appliances existed; for a time it simply meant a cooling chamber or a vessel for chilling. The same Latin frigus gives us the familiar adjective 'frigid', which is a useful spelling cue: notice that 'frigerator' contains the same g-without-a-d pattern. The modern household sense, the insulated cabinet kept cold to preserve food, settled in during the nineteenth century and became standard with mechanical and then electric cooling in the early twentieth. The single most common error, writing an extra 'd' as in 'refridgerator', comes from confusing it with the unrelated word 'fridge', whose informal spelling really does take a 'd'.

How the word is built

• re- (intensive/back)
• frigor- (from Latin frigus: cold, frost)
• -ate (verb formant)
• -or (agent noun: a thing that does)