Spectroscopy

How to spell spectroscopy

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce spectroscopy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spectroscopy mean?

1. nounThe scientific study of how matter absorbs or emits light and other radiation, used to identify substances and analyse their composition.

Spectroscopy in a sentence

• The lab uses spectroscopy to identify trace metals in the water sample.

• Astronomers rely on spectroscopy to measure the chemical makeup of distant stars.

Where does spectroscopy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a scientific compound assembled in the nineteenth century from two older roots. The first part comes from the Latin spectrum, meaning 'image' or 'appearance', which in turn derives from specere, 'to look at'; in optics it came to name the band of coloured light that a prism spreads out from white light. The second part, -scopy, comes from the Greek skopein, 'to look at' or 'to examine', the same element found in telescope and microscope. The two were joined around the 1860s, the decade in which scientists such as Bunsen and Kirchhoff discovered that each chemical element produces its own pattern of spectral lines, allowing substances to be identified by the light they emit or absorb. The spelling trap lies in the seam between the parts: the 'spectro' keeps the 'c' before the 't', and the ending is '-scopy' (one 's', a hard c), so the joined word carries two c sounds spelled differently.

How the word is built

• spectro- (from Latin spectrum: image, appearance)
• -scopy (from Greek skopein: to look at, examine)