Transmitter

How to spell transmitter

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce transmitter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does transmitter mean?

1. nounA device that generates and sends out radio, television or other signals.

Transmitter in a sentence

• The radio station upgraded its transmitter to reach the whole valley.

• Engineers traced the fault to a faulty transmitter on the rooftop mast.

Where does transmitter come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on the Latin verb transmittere, which meant 'to send across' or 'to pass over', formed from trans 'across' and mittere 'to send'. The same mittere root sends its way through a whole family of English words, including 'mission', 'missile', 'submit' and 'permit', all of which carry the underlying idea of dispatching or letting something go. English took the verb 'transmit' from the Latin in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first in the sense of passing on property, disease or information. The agent noun 'transmitter', meaning the person or thing that does the transmitting, followed later, and it became firmly attached to electrical and radio equipment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as telegraphy and broadcasting developed. The doubled t in the middle is the spelling trap: it comes from the mitt of mittere meeting the trans- prefix, not from any doubling rule.

How the word is built

• trans- (across)
• mitt (from Latin mittere: to send)
• -er (agent noun: the thing that does the action)