Nearby Words

-tron

Origin

-tron

a combining form extracted from electron, used with nouns or combining forms, principally in the names of electron tubes (ignitron; klystron; magnetron) and of devices for accelerating subatomic particles (cosmotron; cyclotron); also, more generally, in the names of any kind of chamber or apparatus used in experiments (biotron).

Origin:
by initial shortening of electron, with perhaps accidental allusion to the Gk instrumental suffix -tron, as in árotron plough
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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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-tron is always a great word to know.
So is slumgullion. Does it mean:
a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.
a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.
Collins
World English Dictionary
-tron
 
suffix forming nouns
1.  indicating a vacuum tube: magnetron
2.  indicating an instrument for accelerating atomic or subatomic particles: synchrotron
 
[from Greek, suffix indicating instrument]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Etymonline
Word Origin & History

-tron
as a suffix in new compounds formed in physics, 1939, abstracted from electron (Gk. -tron was an instrumentive suffix).
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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