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Affixes: the building blocks of English
Affixes: the building blocks of English
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-ode2

A conductor of electricity.

[Greek hodos, way.]

The ending was invented by William Whewell in 1834 when advising Michael Faraday on names for the conductors by which electricity enters or leaves a medium (originally a solution). He proposed cathode (Greek kata-, down) for the negatively charged pole by which electrons enter the medium, and anode (Greek ana, up) for the other. Faraday invented electrode from electric as a general term for either conductor. A set created later on their model describes thermionic valves with a given number of electrodes: diode, triode, tetrode, pentode; the first two now more usually refer to types of semiconductor device.

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