Dynamo
/ˈdaɪnəmoʊ/noun
A generator that turns rotation into electric current, or a person of relentless energy.
The Greek roots
Literally: “power machine”
The story of the word
Werner von Siemens demonstrated the self-exciting generator in 1866, and the German name for the class, dynamoelektrische Maschine, was clipped in English to dynamo by the 1880s. δύναμις is power or potential, the noun behind Aristotle's potentiality and behind the dynamite Alfred Nobel named in 1867. Calling a tireless colleague a dynamo dates from those same electric decades, when the machine was the most impressive thing in the room.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German → English
- First recorded
- 1882
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The bicycle had a dynamo that whined against the tyre and powered the lamp.
She is the dynamo of that department and everyone knows it.