Other forms: batteries
A battery is the store of power inside a phone or a toy. It runs out at the worst possible moment.
The word came from artillery, where a battery is a group of guns, and the sense of a group survives, since a battery of tests means a whole series of them. Farming used it grimly for battery hens, kept in rows of cages. Law has an entirely separate sense, since battery means unlawfully striking somebody, which is why the charge is assault and battery. Recharging your batteries is the everyday metaphor.
1nounbatteryA device that stores and supplies electrical power.
“The battery lasts about two days.”
2nounconnectedA connected series or set of things.
“They ran a battery of tests overnight.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
A battery is a beating. Old French baterie was the action of beating, from batre, to beat, which is how one word came to cover an assault and a row of guns alike.
Old French
baterie
Middle French
batterie
English, today
battery
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French batterie, from Old French baterie. Borrowed from Middle French batterie, from Old French baterie (“action of beating”), from batre (“beat”), from Latin battuō (“beat”), from cel-gau -. a doublet of batterie. by surface analysis, batter + -y. The electrical sense was coined by Benjamin Franklin by analogy with a military battery that his series of Leyden jars resembled.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA