capacitor

[kuh-pas-i-ter] /kəˈpæs ɪ tər/

noun, Electricity

a device for accumulating and holding a charge of electricity, consisting of two equally charged conducting surfaces having opposite signs and separated by a dielectric.

Also called condenser.

Origin

1925-30; capacit(y) + -or²

Examples from the web for capacitor

She worked in the department of injection molding, forming capacitor bodies from hardening epoxy.
Such a capacitor gauge could become a common sight on the dashboards of the future.
For reasons of reliability, therefore, an extra transistor and capacitor are added to each cell as a back up.
But they first need to show that they can reliably produce chips requiring only one transistor and capacitor per bit.
The bus automatically plugs in to a high voltage electrical outlet at each bus stop, recharging its capacitor.
The larger the area of the plates, and the smaller the space between them, the more energy a capacitor can hold.
My dinosaur suit would have a jet pack, rocket launchers, and a flux capacitor.
To anyone familiar with electronics, a parallel capacitor works in a similar fashion.
From the inverter the power can enter a zero-cross switch and capacitor bank for phase synchronization.
Where the electrodes cross, it creates a charge-storage device called a capacitor.

British Dictionary definitions for capacitor

capacitor

/kəˈpæsɪtə/

noun

a device for accumulating electric charge, usually consisting of two conducting surfaces separated by a dielectric Former name condenser

Word Origin and History for capacitor

"device which stores electricity," 1926, from capacity with Latinate agent-noun ending.

capacitor in Science

capacitor

(kə-pās'ĭ-tər)

An electrical device consisting of two conducting plates separated by an electrical insulator (the dielectric), designed to hold an electric charge. Charge builds up when a voltage is applied across the plates, creating an electric field between them. Current can flow through a capacitor only as the voltage across it is changing, not when it is constant. Capacitors are used in power supplies, amplifiers, signal processors, oscillators, and logic gates. Compare induction coil, resistor.

capacitor in Culture

capacitor [(kuh-pas-i-tuhr)]

A device used in electrical circuits. The capacitor stores an electrical charge for short periods of time, and then returns it to the circuit.

capacitor in Technology

electronics
An electronic device that can store electrical charge. The charge stored Q in Coulombs is related to the capacitance C in Farads and the voltage V across the capacitor in Volts by Q = CV.
The basis of a dynamic RAM cell is a capacitor. They are also used for power-supply smoothing (or "decoupling"). This is especially important in digital circuits where a digital device switching between states causes a sudden demand for current. Without sufficient local power supply decoupling, this current "spike" cannot be supplied directly from the power supply due to the inductance of the connectors and so will cause a sharp drop in the power supply voltage near the switching device. This can cause other devices to malfunction resulting in hard to trace glitches.
(1995-04-12)