drone
/dɹoʊn/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.00 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "All with united force combine to drive / The lazy drones from the laborious hive."
- "SHYLOCK: / The patch is kind enough, but a huge feeder, / Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day / More than the wild-cat; drones hive not with me; / Therefore I part with him; and part with him / To one what I would have him help to waste / His borrowed purse. […]"
- "he that gathereth not every day as much as I doe, the next day shall be set beyond the river, and be banished from the Fort as a drone, till he amend his conditions or starve."
- "by living as a drone, to be an unprofitable or unworthy member of so learned and noble a society"
- "aerial drones"
- "sea drones"
Etymology
From Middle English drane, dron, drone, from Old English drān, drǣn, from Proto-West Germanic *drānu, from Proto-Germanic *drenô, *drēnuz (“drone”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰreh₁n- (“bee, drone, hornet”). Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Droane (“drone”), Dutch dar (“drone”), German Drohne (“drone”), Limburgish dreen, Droon (“drone”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, and Norwegian Nynorsk drone (“drone”), Swedish drönare (“drone”); also Belarusian тру́цень (trúcjenʹ, “drone”), Bulgarian търтей (tărtej, “drone”), Czech trubec (“drone”), Macedonian трут (trut, “drone”), Polish trąd, trut, truteń (“drone”), Russian and Ukrainian тру́тень (trútenʹ, “drone”), Serbo-Croatian тру̑т, trȗt (“drone”), Slovak trúd (“drone”), Slovene trot (“drone”). The etymology of the sense of "remote-controlled aircraft" is disputed; theories include early military UAVs dumbly flying on preset paths.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /dɹoʊn/
- British English: /dɹəʊn/