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Why no Farad or Henry meter?

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tooki:

--- Quote from: retiredfeline on December 02, 2023, 09:47:30 am ---Of course what really grates is that a potentiometer doesn't measure potentios and is not a meter, but a voltage divider.  :-//

--- End quote ---
Indeed! It would have made sense to call it a “potentiostat” (a word that has since been claimed for a particular type of test equipment used in electrochemistry), since it sets the potential, much the way a rheostat sets current.

Huh, and look at this: there is a measurement device called a potentiometer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer_(measuring_instrument)

Since it contains at its core a potentiometer (i.e. a variable resistor), maybe the variable resistor got its name from this.

coromonadalix:
I'm Canadian French

We are often using some american slang or the common ones, or the shortest appelations / names 
or mix the english term in french discutions  etc ...  or anything who please   loll

multimêtre, voltmêtre, amperèmêtre, joulemêtre,  "capacimêtre" "Cap meter"  loll

lcr meter, lcr mêtre, voltmeter, "amp meter", electrometer, DMM,  "Meter" aka multimeter

trimpot, pot, slide pot,  potmeter  loll   potentiometer is too long,  but the old techs are still using the long name

TimFox:

--- Quote from: tooki on December 02, 2023, 04:08:51 pm ---
--- Quote from: TimFox on November 27, 2023, 04:26:59 pm ---In France, it is pronounced (roughly) "me tre", hence the spelling.
In America, it is pronounced "meet er", hence the spelling.

--- End quote ---
The word is pronounced the same in the US (where it’s spelled meter) and the UK (where it’s pronounced metre) so this explanation is clearly not correct.

It’s simply a classic example of American English ending in -er where British* English ends in -re. Like theater and center, whose pronunciations are also the same in the US and the UK. (Ignoring rhoticity variants, since both the US and UK have rhotic and non-rhotic dialects.)

*British and all the other non-US dialects, with the possible exception of Canadian, which picks and chooses American or British spellings depending on the word… :p

--- End quote ---

Note that I said nothing about British pronunciation and spelling in my post.  I was giving my opinion on why American spelling prefers "meter".
The divergence in spelling dates back to Noah Webster's extreme revisions starting in 1806, many of which (such as deleting "u" from "colour" and "ue" from "analogue") have persisted.
His 1828 dictionary is available online:  https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/meter  "This word is most improperly written metre. How very absurd to write the simple word in this manner, but in all its numerous compounds, meter as in diameter, hexameter, thermometer, etc."

RoGeorge:
In Romanian (a language from the Romance group - like Italian, Spanish, French, etc.) it is spelled 'metru'.
The genealogy of the 'metru' word is from the Greek 'metron', which would translate as 'a/one measure' (as in one unit).

In Ro, all the other 'metru' composed words have the same Greek-like termination:
'diametru', 'hexametru', 'termometru', 'kilometru', etc.

TimFox:
I assume that in Romanian the pronunciation follows the "tru" spelling?

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