Flying High: Aviation Words

If you shoot video from a drone, that's aerial footage. An antenna sticking up out of a car or house to pick up radio or TV signals is also called an aerial, though in the age of satellites and wifi that use of the word is an endangered species. That may be for the best, because crashing your drone into your neighbor's TV aerial would be a drag.

We get our word "air" from the Greek aero, and like aerial above and aeronautics below it can be combined with other roots to make new words. Many scientific terms originate in Greek; in this case adding dinamis, the Greek word for "power," creates this branch of engineering devoted to making vehicles pass through the air with minimal resistance. Ferraris and fighter planes represent excellent examples of aerodynamic vehicles.

Yet another aero- word, this one ends in something you may recognize if you know the word "nautical." Nautikos is Greek for "sailor," so aeronautics means "sailing through the air." The first "A" in NASA stands for aeronautics.

The fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, delta, is shaped like a triangle. It's used in math and physics to stand for different things; in the latter it represents "change." But for the purposes of this list, it refers to planes with wings shaped like a huge triangle. It's a shape often seen in supersonic aircraft like fighter planes.

You likely know this word from your game controller, but it originated in the early days of flight, around 1910, as the slang term for the vertical control lever in an airplane.

From the Latin lavatorium meaning "a place to wash," lavatory evolved into a term for sinks or washbasins, which is still in use. Eventually lavatory became the name for a bathroom on an airplane, though "purgatory" might be more appropriate, especially at the end of a long flight.

You probably know this word refers to taxicabs, but it's also the word that describes an aircraft's movement on the ground between the gate and the runway. A taximeter is the device in a cab that records the distance traveled and thus the fare; taxi was used to describe the movement of planes on the ground because cabs would also drive slowly when looking for passengers.

Old-fashioned water wheels are turbines, and so are jet engines and the huge generators in power plants. The Latin word turbo, meaning "tornado" or "something that turns around an axis," is also used to describe a booster in some car engines.

Another turbo-rooted word, turbulence refers to choppy winds that cause the plane you're on to bounce and buck, sometimes pretty severely. Water can also be called turbulent—think rapids—and if water is murky or muddy, turbid would be a good word to describe it.