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''nacelle'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''nacelle'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260124004559-00-⌔

nacelle - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

nacelle (plural nacelles)

  • (aviation)
    • The compartment that holds passengers on a dirigible, hot-air balloon, or other aerostat; a gondola.
    • A separate streamlined enclosure mounted on an aircraft to house, originally, an engine, and now also cargo or crew.
    • (archaic) The cockpit of an aircraft.
  • (by extension)
    • A hollow boat - shaped structure.
    • An enclosure housing machinery or a motor.
    • (electrical engineering) The part between the rotor and tower of a wind turbine.
    • (nautical) The submersed providers of buoyancy of a SWATH - hulled boat.
    • (road transport) A streamlined enclosure on the body or dashboard of a motor vehicle.

Etymology

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The nacelle (sense 1.1) or gondola of the Hindenburg airship.

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The nacelle (sense 1.2) of a Boeing 737-400 aircraft housing one of its engines.

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The box - shaped nacelle (sense 2.3) of a wind turbine.

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The headlamp of a Douglas Dragonfly motorcycle is housed in a nacelle (sense 2.5).

Borrowed from French nacelle (“rowing boat, skiff; gondola (of a hot-air balloon, etc.); structure on an aircraft to house an engine”), Middle French nacelle (“rowing boat, skiff”), from Old French nacele, from Late Latin naucella, nāvicella (“small boat or ship”), from Latin nāvis (“a ship”) (from Proto-Indo-European ﹡néh₂us (“a boat”)) + -ella (diminutive suffix).1

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA: /nəˈsɛl/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɛl
  • Hyphenation: na‧celle

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. “nacelle, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2023; “nacelle, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩

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