Telescope

How to spell telescope

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce telescope

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does telescope mean?

1. nounAn optical instrument that uses lenses or mirrors to make distant objects appear nearer and larger.
2. verbTo slide or compress sections together so they fit inside one another, or to condense something into a shorter form.

Telescope in a sentence

• noun

  The astronomer adjusted the telescope to bring the moon into focus.

• verb

  The engineers designed the antenna to telescope down into the base for storage.

• noun

  We bought a small telescope to watch the planets from the garden.

• verb

  The editor managed to telescope three chapters into a single summary.

Where does telescope come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word telescope was coined in the early 1600s from two Greek elements: tele, meaning 'far' or 'distant', and skopein, 'to look at' or 'to watch'. The Greek-based name is usually credited to the scholar who reported the new instrument at the academy in Rome around 1611, just after Galileo turned his improved version of the device toward the night sky. English took the word up almost immediately, by way of the Italian telescopio and Latin telescopium. The same tele- prefix still announces 'distance' in everyday relatives like telephone (far sound) and television (far seeing), while skopein lies behind microscope and periscope, so the -scope ending always points to looking. Spellers slip on the silent middle 'e' in tele- and the single 'l', since the eye expects the longer cluster it sees in words like 'tell'.

How the word is built

• tele- (far, distant)
• -scope (from skopein: to look at, watch)