Transistor

How to spell transistor

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce transistor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does transistor mean?

1. nounA small semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power.

Transistor in a sentence

• The engineer replaced a faulty transistor on the circuit board.

• The technician tested each transistor on the board with a meter.

Where does transistor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a twentieth-century coinage rather than an ancient root, but its parts are old. It was invented at Bell Laboratories in the United States, where the device itself was demonstrated in 1947 and named in 1948 by the engineer John R. Pierce. The name is a deliberate blend of 'transfer' and 'resistor', because the component transfers an electrical signal across a material that also resists current. The 'trans' part traces back to the Latin preposition trans, meaning 'across' or 'beyond', the same element found in 'transfer', 'transport', and 'transit'. The 'istor' ending was lifted directly from 'resistor', itself built on the Latin resistere, 'to stand against'. Because the word stitches together the tail of 'resistor', writers sometimes hesitate over the single 's' and the '-istor' spelling, but remembering its parent words makes the form easy to fix.

How the word is built

• trans- (from 'transfer')
• -istor (from 'resistor'); a blend of the two whole words