Etymograph

English

battery

Battery comes from Old French baterie ‘action of beating’, from batre ‘beat’, and ultimately from Latin battuō.

  1. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEbattuō1‘beat’
  2. Old Frenchc. 842–1400batre1‘beat’
  3. Old Frenchc. 842–1400baterie1‘action of beating’
  4. Middle Frenchc. 1400–1600batterie1
  5. Englishearliest quotation 1766battery1

attested reconstructed ? uncertain or disputed deepest recorded ancestor

  1. 1 Wiktionary, English battery
  2. Earliest quotation in Wiktionary’s entry: 1766, John Entick, A New and Accurate History and Survey of London: “On this wharf [Tower Bridge wharf] there is a…”.

Lineage

  1. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEbattuōWiktionary, English battery‘beat’
  2. Old Frenchc. 842–1400batreWiktionary, English battery‘beat’
  3. Old Frenchc. 842–1400baterieWiktionary, English battery‘action of beating’
  4. Middle Frenchc. 1400–1600batterieWiktionary, English battery
  5. Englishearliest quotation 1766batteryWiktionary, English battery. Earliest quotation in Wiktionary’s entry: 1766, John Entick, A New and Accurate History and Survey of London: “On this wharf [Tower Bridge wharf] there is a…”

The story

The electrical sense was coined by American polymath Benjamin Franklin by analogy with a military battery that his series of Leyden jars resembled.

Full etymology on Wiktionary

Word family

English words that share an ancestor with battery, grouped by the ancestor they share, most familiar first.

through Proto-Indo-European *bʰedʰh₂- ‘to stab, dig’

  • bed ← bedd ← *badi ← *badją ← *bʰodʰ-yó-m
  • fossil ← fossile ← fossilis ← fodio ← *foðjō

through Latin battuō ‘beat’

  • battle ← batel ← bataille ← battālia ← battuālia
  • combat ← combatre ← *combattere

through Old French batre ‘beat’

24 more relatives in the full family tree

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Today it means

noun A device used to power electric devices, consisting of one or more electrically connected electrochemical cells or (archaically) electrostatic cells.

Sources

Sources: Wiktionary, “battery”. By Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0, via kaikki.org (dump of Oct 3 2026); text adapted and restructured. Language periods are conventional ranges, not dates for this word. License.

Etymograph / Latin battuō / battery