negawatt
UK/ˈnɛɡ.ə.wɒt//ˈnɛɡ.ə.wɑt/
negawatt noun: a unit of saved energy.
Noun
negawatt (plural negawatts)
- A unit of saved energy.
- And he has suggested ways to help consumers buy the so-called time-of-use-meters […] so they can benefit from using energy at off-peak times and through "negawatts," or credits for not using power.2000 December 24, Barbara Whitaker, “A Lightning Rod in California”, in The New York Times
- Three-fourths of U.S. electricity--69% of which is used in buildings, nearly all the rest in industry--can be saved for less than the price of just running a coal or nuclear plant. This "negawatt" potential is not just in smarter motors, lights, appliances, etc., but even more in their larger...2008 July 7, Amory B. Lovins, “The Case For Efficiency”, in Forbes
Forms of negawatt
| plural | negawatts |
|---|
Origin of negawatt
Coined by Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute as a contraction of negative watt on the model of similar compounds like megawatt, by surface analysis, nega- + watt. Lovins credited the term to a typo in a document by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission in which the word "megawatt" was misspelled.
Questions about negawatt
- What does negawatt mean?
- Negawatt means a unit of saved energy.
- What part of speech is negawatt?
- Negawatt is a noun.
- How do you pronounce negawatt?
- Negawatt is pronounced /ˈnɛɡ.ə.wɒt/ (UK).
- What is the plural of negawatt?
- The plural of negawatt is negawatts.
Words near negawatt in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: negawatt (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-negawatt.ogg.
Cite this entry: “negawatt.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/negawatt. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.