Ultrasound

How to spell ultrasound

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce ultrasound

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ultrasound mean?

1. nounSound vibration at a frequency above the range of human hearing, used in imaging and cleaning.
2. nounA medical scan that uses high-frequency sound waves to produce an image of structures inside the body.

Ultrasound in a sentence

• The engineers used ultrasound to detect tiny cracks in the metal pipe.

• The clinic booked her in for an ultrasound at twelve weeks.

• Bats navigate in the dark by emitting bursts of ultrasound.

• The doctor ordered an ultrasound to examine the patient's kidney.

Where does ultrasound come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a modern compound, assembled in English during the twentieth century from two pieces with very different histories. The first part is the Latin prefix ultra-, meaning 'beyond' or 'on the far side of', the same element that gives us 'ultraviolet' for light beyond the violet end of the spectrum. The second part, 'sound', descends from the Latin sonus 'a noise' by way of Old French son, picking up its final 'd' in English much as 'gospel' and other words gathered extra letters over time. Put together, ultrasound literally names vibration pitched 'beyond sound', that is, above the upper limit of human hearing, roughly 20,000 cycles per second. The term emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as physicists studied high-frequency vibrations, and it became a household word once medical imaging using these waves spread from the 1950s onward. Because the spelling simply welds the familiar prefix onto the familiar word, the main thing to remember is that no letters are dropped or doubled at the join.

How the word is built

• ultra- (beyond)
• sound (vibration that travels through air or matter)