Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

flux capacitor

Word Rarity Rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.03 in modern English

Syllables: flux -ca-pac-i-tor
IPA

29

Scrabble Score

13

Letters

5

Syllables

11

Unique Chars

Meaning

noun

A fictional instrument required to operate a time machine, consisting of a rectangular-shaped compartment with three flashing Geissler-style tubes arranged in a "Y" configuration.

Example Sentences

"Tucked into the corner of the Rinky Dink Flea Market in Marietta is a time machine that transports its visitors to an era before digital music. It doesn’t need a flux capacitor to work, just a plug to power the vintage stereos and turntables that produce the sounds of the thousands of vinyl records sold there."
"Is this a glitch? Is the system experiencing an outage? It is a temptation that is best resisted, the urge to talk about this Chelsea team as a piece of fine-point engineering, to style Thomas Tuchel as a pure systems man, poring over his data charts, banging his dials, reconfiguring the flux capacitor with a bent hairpin."

Etymology

First seen in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension in 1984 and in the 1985 American science fiction film Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis, in which a DMC DeLorean vehicle is retrofitted with a flux capacitor to create a time travel device.

Inflected Forms

flux capacitors (plural)

Phrases

lateral flux capacitor

Frequently Paired Words

lateral flux capacitor

Questions

What does flux capacitor mean?: A fictional instrument required to operate a time machine, consisting of a rectangular-shaped compartment with three flashing Geissler-style tubes arranged in a "Y" configuration.
Where does flux capacitor come from?: First seen in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension in 1984 and in the 1985 American science fiction film Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis, in which a DMC DeLorean vehicle is retrofitted with a flux capacitor to create a time travel device.

How to pronounce flux capacitor

Open the pronunciation page — Open the Speakur entry for “flux capacitor”.
Read the phonetic spelling — Read the IPA spelling () so you know which sounds to aim for.
Play the audio — Click Play to hear reference audio for “flux capacitor”.
Repeat and practice — Say “flux capacitor” aloud, matching stress and vowels until it feels natural.