Techno

How to spell techno

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce techno

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does techno mean?

1. nounA style of electronic dance music built on repetitive synthesised beats, originating in Detroit in the 1980s.

Techno in a sentence

• The club plays hard techno until the early hours.

• She produces techno in a small home studio.

Where does techno come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a modern clipping of 'technology', which itself reaches back through Latin to the Greek tekhne, meaning 'art, craft, or skill', combined with the suffix -logia, meaning 'the study or discussion of something'. The combining form 'techno-' became hugely productive in English during the twentieth century, generating words such as 'technocrat' and 'technophobe', all carrying the flavour of machinery, science, and engineered modernity. As a name for a style of electronic dance music, 'techno' emerged from Detroit in the 1980s, where producers deliberately chose the label to evoke futurism and machine-made sound. The spelling keeps the Greek 'ch' rendered as 'k' through the standard English habit of writing tekhne-derived roots with 'tech', so the silent-feeling 'ch' is simply written as plain letters here. Because it is a short, phonetic clipping, the trap is mostly remembering the single 'o' ending rather than any hidden letters.

How the word is built

• techno- (from Greek tekhne: art, craft, skill), used here as a clipped standalone word from 'technology'