Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Battery for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "battery" — a noun, pronounced /ˈbætəri/, with the stress on "bat".
Narrator: A battery is a device storing chemical energy for electrical use, or, legally, the act of physical assault.
Narrator: In plain English, battery means the power source in your phone, or, in law, unlawfully striking someone.
Narrator: Its root connects to "batter", to beat, originally describing a group of artillery guns fired together.
Narrator: That military "battery" of guns later extended to electrical cells, arranged in a series like guns in a row.
Narrator: The legal sense, "assault and battery", kept the original violent, beating connotation of the shared root.
Narrator: It differs from "assault" legally — assault is the threat, battery is the actual physical contact itself.
Narrator: "Battery hen" describes a chicken kept in cramped, mass-production farming conditions.
Narrator: So remember: battery is beating turned electrical and legal — guns in a row, power cells in a row, and unlawful force.
Speaker A: "Battery" for a phone charger and "battery" in "assault and battery" feel totally unconnected. Real link, or coincidence?
Speaker B: A genuine, traceable link, though a surprising one! BATTERY connects to "batter", to beat, originally describing artillery guns fired together in a row. Electrical cells arranged in a series borrowed that same "row" imagery, becoming a battery. The legal sense, meanwhile, kept the original violent "beating" meaning directly.
Speaker A: So the electrical sense is about arrangement, while the legal sense is about the violence itself?
Speaker B: Exactly — two different branches growing from the same beating root, one focused on structure, the other on the act of striking!
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "The phone battery is running low"; "he was charged with assault and battery"; "the artillery battery fired in unison" — technology, law, and military history.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Watch the spelling — "battery", not "battary" or "battry". And it's countable — "batteries" for the plural!
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: "Cell" the electrical component cousin, "assault" the closely related legal twin, "power pack" the casual tech alternative, "barrage" for the artillery sense. Battery keeps its energetic, occasionally legal duality!
Speaker B: Let's use "battery" in AI prompts — natural for building device-monitoring dashboards and power-management features.
Speaker A: So battery in a prompt almost always means power-monitoring or device-management features?
Speaker B: Right. For a device-management app, you'd write:
Prompt: Build a battery health dashboard showing charge cycles and current capacity for every device the company issues to staff.
Speaker A: Good — what about an IoT sensor network?
Speaker B: The monitoring prompt:
Prompt: Alert the admin automatically when any sensor's battery drops below fifteen percent, before it goes offline unexpectedly.
Speaker A: An electric vehicle app?
Speaker B: The tracking prompt:
Prompt: Show live battery range on the car's dashboard app, estimating remaining distance based on current driving conditions.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: The mobile-optimisation prompt:
Prompt: Reduce battery drain from this app's background sync, checking for updates every fifteen minutes instead of continuously.
Speaker A: Battery always signals a resource worth monitoring closely before it runs out.
Speaker B: Exactly — say battery, and the AI builds proactive power-level tracking.
Battery — meaning in Arabic & definition More B courses GL Dictionary