Spacecraft

How to spell spacecraft

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce spacecraft

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spacecraft mean?

1. nounA vehicle designed to travel or operate beyond the Earth's atmosphere, in outer space.

Spacecraft in a sentence

• The spacecraft entered orbit exactly on schedule.

• Engineers spent years designing the spacecraft to survive re-entry.

Where does spacecraft come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern English compound, joining 'space' and 'craft', and it belongs squarely to the twentieth century rather than to any ancient root. 'Space' came into English in the 1300s from the Old French 'espace', itself from the Latin 'spatium', meaning an open expanse, an interval, or a stretch of room. 'Craft' is the native Germanic word, from the Old English 'craeft', which originally meant strength, skill, or a trade, and which later came to mean a vessel or vehicle (as in 'aircraft' and 'watercraft'), where the skill of building and steering is implied. The two were welded together in the 1920s and 1930s as rocketry and science fiction began imagining vehicles that travel beyond the atmosphere. The spelling holds no real trap once you see it as two familiar words pushed together, and like 'aircraft' it keeps a single, unchanging form whether you mean one vessel or many.

How the word is built

• space (open expanse beyond Earth)
• craft (vessel, vehicle)