transistor

US/tɹænˈzɪs.tɚ/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,117 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: transistors

A transistor is a tiny device that controls the flow of current. A single transistor.

It replaced the valve and is the thing every computer is built from. A modern chip holds tens of billions of transistors, each smaller than a virus.

Definitions of transistor

1nountransistorA tiny device that controls the flow of current.B2+
“The first transistor was the size of a thumbnail.”

transistor is a device.

Where it comes from

A blend of transfer and resistor, coined at Bell Laboratories in 1947.

transfer and resistor. Said to have been coined by John Robinson Pierce in 1947, who used transresistance as the basis for forming transistor.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

transistor in the wild

Compared to assemblies built from discrete components, integrated circuits are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, more energy-efficient, and less expensive, allowing for a very high transistor count.
Integrated circuit
Some transistors are packaged individually, but many more in miniature form are found embedded in integrated circuits.
Transistor
Because transistors are the key active components in practically all modern electronics, they are considered one of the 20th century's greatest inventions.
Transistor
Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld first proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor (FET) in 1925, but it was not possible to construct a working device at that time.
MOSFET
A bipolar junction transistor (BJT) is a type of transistor that uses both electrons and electron holes as charge carriers.
Bipolar junction transistor

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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.

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