Throughput

How to spell throughput

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce throughput

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does throughput mean?

1. nounThe amount of material, work, or data that passes through a system or process in a given period.

Throughput in a sentence

• The new sorting line doubled the warehouse throughput within a month.

• Network engineers measured the throughput in gigabits per second.

Where does throughput come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern English compound, built transparently from two very old native words: 'through', which descends from the Old English thurh meaning 'from one end to the other', and 'put', meaning 'to place or push'. The combination was coined in the early twentieth century by engineers and industrial managers who needed a word for the quantity of material that passes completely through a process or machine in a given time. It was modelled directly on the older word 'output', simply swapping the 'out' for 'through' to stress the idea of passage all the way through a system rather than what merely comes out. Later, in the computing and networking era, it was adopted to describe the rate at which data moves through a channel or processor. The spelling trap lives entirely in the first half: 'through' keeps its silent 'gh', a fossil of an old guttural sound that English stopped pronouncing but never stopped writing.

How the word is built

• through (from Old English thurh: from end to end)
• put (from Old English putian: to push or place)