Wireless

How to spell wireless

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wireless

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wireless mean?

1. adjectiveOperating or connecting without physical wires or cables, typically using radio waves.
2. nounA radio receiver, an older British term for the household set used to listen to broadcasts.

Wireless in a sentence

• adjective

  The hotel offers free wireless internet in every room.

• noun

  Her grandmother kept an old valve wireless on the kitchen shelf.

• adjective

  She set up a wireless printer that the whole family can use.

• noun

  During the war the family gathered around the wireless for the evening news.

Where does wireless come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wireless is a transparent native English compound, joining the noun 'wire', which descends from Old English 'wir', a word for a thin thread of drawn metal, with the suffix '-less', from Old English 'leas', meaning 'free from' or 'lacking'. The Old English 'wir' shares deep Germanic roots with related words across the family and ultimately connects to an idea of bending or twisting metal into a thread. When telegraph and telephone signals first travelled along physical copper lines, communication that carried no such line was naturally described as 'wireless', and by the 1890s the term was attached to Marconi's radio experiments. In Britain it became the everyday noun for a radio receiver well into the twentieth century, while the same word now mostly describes networks and devices that connect without cables. The spelling is regular once you remember it is simply 'wire' plus '-less', with a single 's' in the suffix.

How the word is built

• wire (metal thread)
• -less (without)