Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Acoustic
/əˈkuːstɪk/adjective
Relating to sound and hearing, or of an instrument played without electrical amplification.
The Greek roots
ἀκουστικός
akoustikós
able to be heard
Literally: “having to do with hearing”
Follow a root:ἀκουστικός2 words
The story of the word
The word entered English in the 1600s as the name of the science of sound, from akoúein, to hear. Its commonest use today is a retronym: nobody said acoustic guitar until electric ones existed, and acoustic piano and acoustic drum followed the same road. Wallace Sabine turned the noun into an engineering discipline in the 1890s by timing how long a clap took to die in a Harvard lecture hall.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
acousticshyperacusispresbycusis
In a sentence
The hall is acoustic murder for anything with a bass drum in it.
She recorded the whole album acoustic, one microphone, no overdubs.