Technologies

How to spell technologies

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce technologies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does technologies mean?

1. nounThe plural of technology: distinct branches of applied science, or the tools, machines, and methods they produce.

Technologies in a sentence

• The company invested heavily in clean energy technologies last year.

• Modern hospitals rely on imaging technologies that did not exist a generation ago.

Where does technologies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek tekhnologia, which meant the systematic treatment of an art or craft. It was built from tekhne, meaning 'art, skill, or craft' (the same root that gives us 'technique' and 'technical'), joined to logos, meaning 'word, reason, or study', which sits inside countless English words ending in -ology. English adopted 'technology' in the early 1600s, at first to describe a discourse or treatise on the practical arts, and only later did it come to mean the applied tools and methods themselves. The familiar plural 'technologies' rose to prominence in the modern era to describe distinct fields or systems of applied knowledge. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle: the silent 'h' after the opening 'tec' and the 'gies' ending, where the hard Greek root softens to a 'j' sound.

How the word is built

• techn- (from Greek tekhne: art, craft, skill)
• -o- (connecting vowel)
• -log- (from logos: word, study)
• -y (noun suffix)
• -ies (plural)