Technology

How to spell technology

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce technology

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does technology mean?

1. nounThe application of scientific knowledge to practical tools, machines, and methods.

Technology in a sentence

• The company invests heavily in new technology each year.

• Modern medical technology has transformed how diseases are diagnosed.

Where does technology come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: tekhne, meaning 'art, craft, or skill', and logia, meaning 'a study or discourse', from logos 'word, reason'. It first entered English in the seventeenth century with the narrow sense of a systematic treatment or vocabulary of an art or craft, much as 'biology' is the study of life. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the industrial age advanced, the meaning broadened from the study of practical arts to the practical arts and machinery themselves. The same tekhne root sits inside 'technical' and 'technique', while the -logy ending links it to a whole family of academic words such as 'geology' and 'psychology'. The 'ch' spelling, pronounced as a hard 'k', is the standard English clue that a word has Greek ancestry, and that quiet detail is the main spelling trap here.

How the word is built

• techn- (from Greek tekhne: art, craft, skill)
• -o- (connecting vowel)
• -logy (from Greek logia: study or discourse)