Zeppelin

How to spell zeppelin

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce zeppelin

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does zeppelin mean?

1. nounA large rigid airship with an internal metal framework supporting gas-filled cells, of the kind pioneered in the early 1900s.

Zeppelin in a sentence

• The museum displays a scale model of a wartime zeppelin alongside early biplanes.

• Passengers once crossed the Atlantic aboard a luxurious zeppelin rather than by ship.

Where does zeppelin come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is an eponym, taken directly from the surname of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the German military officer and aviation pioneer who designed the first practical rigid airships at the start of the twentieth century. His large, cigar-shaped craft used a rigid internal frame to hold separate gas cells, and the design was so dominant that his family name became the everyday term for the whole class of aircraft, much as 'hoover' came from a vacuum cleaner maker. The German surname itself comes from a place name in the Lake Constance region near where the airships were built. English adopted the word around 1900, keeping the original German spelling intact, which is why it carries a single 'z', a doubled 'p', and the unstressed '-elin' ending that trips up writers. The craft gained fame, and later notoriety, for transatlantic passenger flights and wartime bombing raids, and the name still evokes that early age of lighter-than-air travel.

How the word is built

• Zeppelin (German surname)
• (no affix; an eponym used as a common noun)