glider

UK/ˈɡlaɪdə(ɹ)/US/ˈɡlaɪdɚ/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,592 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: gliders

A glider is an aircraft with no engine that rides the air currents. Launch a glider, fly a glider, a glider pilot.

It is towed or winched into the air and then stays up by finding rising air, so a good pilot can cover hundreds of kilometres on a warm day. Military gliders carried troops silently in the Second World War and were used once and abandoned.

Definitions of glider

1noungliderAn aircraft with no engine that rides the air currents.B2+
“The glider was towed into the air by a small plane and then released.”

glider is an aircraft.

Where it comes from

Glide plus -er. Old English glidan meant to move smoothly, and the aircraft sense dates from the 1890s.

Middle English
glider
English, today
glider

From Middle English glider, glydare, equivalent to glide + er.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Vehicles & Machines

Practise this word

glider in the wild

Early hang gliders had a low lift-to-drag ratio, so pilots were restricted to gliding down small hills.
Hang gliding
A motor glider is a fixed-wing aircraft that can be flown with or without engine power.
Motor glider
At a certain depth, the glider switches to positive buoyancy to climb back up and forward, and the cycle is then repeated.
Underwater glider
A wide variety of glider designs are in use by navies and ocean research organizations, with gliders typically costing around US$100,000.
Underwater glider
Furthermore, the glider, once released at some distance from the actual target, was effectively silent and difficult for the enemy to identify.
Military glider

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

glide

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