Wavelength

How to spell wavelength

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wavelength

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wavelength mean?

1. nounThe distance between two successive corresponding points of a wave, such as two crests of light or sound.
2. nounA shared way of thinking or feeling that lets people understand each other easily.

Wavelength in a sentence

• Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light.

• The two colleagues were clearly on the same wavelength during the meeting.

• The radio station broadcasts on a specific wavelength that listeners must tune to.

• She found a manager on her wavelength who understood her ideas at once.

Where does wavelength come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound built entirely from native English parts, joining 'wave' to 'length'. The first element descends from the Old English 'wafian', meaning to move the hands to and fro, and the related noun sense for a moving ridge of water, all tied to the idea of swaying motion. The second element comes from Old English 'lengthu', the noun formed from 'lang' (long), describing a measured extent. The word itself is relatively modern: it was coined in the nineteenth century as physics developed the study of light and sound as waves, naming the distance between two matching points on successive waves. Because both halves are everyday words, the spelling trap is simply remembering that they fuse into a single solid word with no gap or hyphen, and that the joined 'wave' keeps its silent final 'e' before 'length'.

How the word is built

• wave (a moving ripple or oscillation)
• length (the measured distance from end to end)