Satellite

How to spell satellite

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce satellite

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does satellite mean?

1. nounAn object, natural or artificial, that orbits a larger body such as a planet.
2. adjectiveDependent on or controlled by something larger and more central.

Satellite in a sentence

• noun

  The weather forecast relies on images from a satellite in orbit.

• adjective

  The company runs a satellite office on the other side of the city.

• noun

  The moon is the only natural satellite of our planet.

• adjective

  Several satellite towns grew up around the industrial centre.

Where does satellite come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin satelles, with the stem satellit-, which meant an attendant, an escort, or a bodyguard, the kind of follower who travels alongside an important person. English picked it up in the late 1500s through the French satellite, at first carrying that original human sense of a hanger-on or subordinate. The astronomical meaning arrived when the scientist Johannes Kepler used the Latin word in 1611 to describe the moons he saw circling Jupiter, since they appeared to attend the planet like courtiers around a ruler. From there the sense widened to any smaller body orbiting a larger one, and in the twentieth century it was applied to the artificial objects launched into orbit. The spelling trap lives in the middle: it is a single l (satel-) followed by -lite, even though the doubled and single consonants tempt many writers to second-guess it.

How the word is built

• satell- (from Latin satelles: attendant, escort)
• -ite (noun suffix)