Torpedoes

How to spell torpedoes

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce torpedoes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does torpedoes mean?

1. nounMore than one self-propelled underwater missile designed to explode against a ship's hull.
2. verbDeliberately ruins or wrecks a plan, deal, or agreement, as one person does it.

Torpedoes in a sentence

• noun

  The submarine carried six torpedoes in its forward tubes.

• verb

  One careless comment from him often torpedoes the whole negotiation.

• noun

  The museum displayed two decommissioned torpedoes from the war.

• verb

  A sudden tax rise torpedoes any chance of buying the house this year.

Where does torpedoes come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin torpedo, which originally meant 'numbness' or 'stiffness' and came from the verb torpere, meaning 'to be stiff, sluggish, or numb'. The Romans also used torpedo as the name of the electric ray, a flat fish that delivers a shock strong enough to make a hand go numb, so the name was a vivid description of its effect. English borrowed the word in the sixteenth century, first for that very fish, and only later, around 1800, did it come to mean a self-propelled underwater explosive that strikes a ship below the waterline. The same torpere root sits inside 'torpid' and 'torpor', words for sluggish drowsiness, which is a useful reminder that the deadly weapon and the lazy adjective share one numb ancestor. The spelling trap lives in the plural: words ending in -o that come from such roots take -oes, so it is torpedoes, never the tempting but wrong 'torpedos'.

How the word is built

• torped- (from Latin torpere, to be numb or stiff)
• -o (noun ending)
• -es (plural / third-person inflection)