Word.ws English Dictionary

capacitor plague

capacitor plague noun: premature failure of an electrolytic capacitor, especially when several are beginning to fail at the same time in a piece of equipment (due, for example, to high demands imposed by the circuit design, such as in a switchmode power supply), necessitating "re-capping" (i.e. replacing many capacitors after disconnecting the power and waiting for lethal charge to dissipate).

capacitor plague: premature failure of an electrolytic capacitor, especially when several are beginning to fail at...
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Noun

capacitor plague (uncountable)

  1. (informal) Premature failure of an electrolytic capacitor, especially when several are beginning to fail at the same time in a piece of equipment (due, for example, to high demands imposed by the circuit design, such as in a switchmode power supply), necessitating "re-capping" (i.e. replacing many capacitors after disconnecting the power and waiting for lethal charge to dissipate).

Questions about capacitor plague

What does capacitor plague mean?
Capacitor plague means premature failure of an electrolytic capacitor, especially when several are beginning to fail at the same time in a piece of equipment (due, for example, to high demands imposed by the circuit design, such as in a switchmode power supply), necessitating "re-capping" (i.e. replacing many capacitors after disconnecting the power and waiting for lethal charge to dissipate).
What part of speech is capacitor plague?
Capacitor plague is a noun.

Words near capacitor plague in the dictionary

  1. capacitive coupling
  2. capacitive couplings
  3. capacitively
  4. capacitivity
  5. capacitor
  6. capacitor plague
  7. capacitorless
  8. capacitors
  9. capacitous
  10. capacitron
  11. capacitrons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: capacitor plague (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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