Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An apparatus for measuring gases.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In chem.:
  • noun An instrument or apparatus intended to measure, collect, preserve, or mix different gases.
  • noun An instrument for measuring the quantity of gas employed in any chemical experiment.
  • noun A reservoir or storehouse for gas, especially for the ordinary illuminating gas produced in gas-works, which supplies the various pipes employed in lighting streets and houses.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An apparatus for holding and measuring of gas; in gas works, a huge iron cylinder closed at one end and having the other end immersed in water, in which it is made to rise or fall, according to the volume of gas it contains, or the pressure required.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any of various instruments used to measure the flow of gas through pipelines.
  • noun A gasholder.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a meter for measuring the amount of gas flowing through a particular pipe
  • noun a large gas-tight spherical or cylindrical tank for holding gas to be used as fuel

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French gazomètre : gaz, gas (from Dutch gas; see gas) + -mètre, -meter.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

gas +‎ -meter

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Examples

  • When thoroughly washed, it flows through the pipe, L, into the gasometer, which is of galvanized iron, and is very carefully balanced.

    Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 Various

  • And the millions who stay at home, how are they to be persuaded that the thrill provoked by a locomotive or a gasometer is the real thing?

    Art Clive Bell 1922

  • Near the gasometer is the hydraulic machine for supplying with water the tank on the top of the house; all the other services on this line of pipe are screwed off, and thus the water is forced to the top of the building.

    Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 Various 1841

  • The shopping mall levels in each gasometer are connected to the others by skybridges.

    Gasometers Reimagined as Apartment Community 2009

  • Each gasometer was divided into several zones for living (apartments in the top), working (offices in the middle floors) and entertainment and shopping (shopping malls in the ground floors).

    Gasometers Reimagined as Apartment Community 2009

  • RT @VariousArch @bryanboyer: What will be the 2000s gasometer?

    Ballardian » Twitter links, part 2 2010

  • I do like a nice gasometer and yes, Fred, he's done it again hasn't he .... a very nice piece of deconstruction too from your good self, what with all that juxtaposing and echoing going on.

    Cricket & All That Gas Peter Ashley 2008

  • What with your artfully juxtaposed angles of pub roof and gasometer girders, and your stark relief foliage echoing the passing clouds in the background.

    Cricket & All That Gas Peter Ashley 2008

  • The unsightly cast-iron gasometer that gave its name to a hairpin bend is long gone, the train station whose ticket office overlooked another 180-degree corner has been replaced by a luxury hotel, and the famous Tabac is buried during race week under the latticed scaffolding of a temporary grandstand.

    Monaco grand prix: The race where heroes are made 2010

  • Well, I probably wont be tuning in and doing another enraged dance about the remaining episodes….and yet, there is a strange fascination, bit like watching a slomo car crash dummy test, or the demolition of a gasometer or such like.

    Primeval: S3 Ep7 – Updated Pondering « INTERSTELLAR TACTICS 2009

Comments

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  • A barbarism, avoided by those seeking to speak literate English.

    April 20, 2011

  • Lovely Flickr photos.

    April 20, 2011

  • What word, by the way, would you recommend using in its place? You know, for that stroke of finesse one needs when talking about large gas storage vessels.

    April 20, 2011

  • American Heritage recommends gasholder... which I am sorely tempted to read as gash-older.

    April 20, 2011

  • I grew up liking the bass drum -om- in the middle of this word. There was - still is, I suspect - a large gasometer on one side of the home ground of one of Melbourne's football teams. It was often referred to in game commentaries I listened to on my trannie: "Greig collects the footy and sprints along the wing in front of the gasometer..."

    I can't see what's illiterate about it. The derivation is not a butchery and there are obvious cognates in French gazomètre and Italian gasometro.

    April 20, 2011

  • Reading this page makes me doubt whether English is my first language.

    Gasometer? Trannie? Footy?

    April 20, 2011

  • Transistor radio. Football. Frogmukluks.

    April 20, 2011

  • Bilby,

    Whoever coined the term was either shameless or knew nothing of word formation. The classical connecting vowel -o- is quite out of place at the end of gas. 'Gas metre' should have been used instead of the present monstrosity.

    This is only one example of a number of illiterate formations ending in 'meter' - speedometer, floodometer, &c.

    April 20, 2011

  • I'm guessing duckobill is a monstrosity, too.

    April 20, 2011

  • I'd never heard this word until today. When I was young we had a propane tank for the stove, and I'm pretty sure any other vessel for holding gas was called a tank--there's the gas tank or fuel tank in your pickup, there's the fuel storage tank or gas storage tank over by the highway, and there might even be those tanks of "anhydrous" that didn't have to have chain-link fence around 'em before those stupid kids started stealing the anhydrous ammonia to cook up batches of meth.

    April 20, 2011

  • April 20, 2011

  • If it's a 'classical connecting vowel' why is it out of place?

    I suppose you could go into a workshop and ask for your speedmeter to be fixed, and I know who'd be thought of as illiterate.

    April 20, 2011

  • That thing looks like the water tank in Petticoat Junction.

    link

    April 20, 2011

  • gas-om-eter-nal????

    April 20, 2011

  • I'd say the "o" is euphonic.

    April 20, 2011

  • Bilby,

    Because it is bad Greek. It is so formed as to outrage that language's principles of word formation. Word-making should be done by those who know how to do it, not by laymen or engineers who know no Latin and less Greek. Literate speakers of English are generally not to be found in workshops and manufactories.

    April 20, 2011

  • The only outrage is your own. English has always been characterised by a voracious, hearty and indeed cavalier approach to morphology; what is lacking in regularity is made up for by breadth and diversity that reflects the historical journey of the tongue and the people who speak it. Long may it continue. Nor is there any 'moral' reason why a Germanic language, and now patently a globabl one, need be a slave to Greek and Latin. Mindful yes, obsequious no.

    April 20, 2011

  • Bad Greek, but perfectly good English!

    April 20, 2011

  • Honestly, all this guff about "word-making". As if English was cold-forged by some mythical Wayland Wordsmith in a halcyon age of morphological innocence.

    April 20, 2011

  • Yarb, Bilby,

    In forming new words one should always make a distinction between suffixes and root words which, though originally Greek or Latin, are now living English, and those which are dead. As examples of the former, -able and -dis may be given, whilst -ous, -ance, and -o- are examples of the latter. Living suffixes can be used with some freedom to form new words, even if contrary to the original rules of Latin or Greek word formation, or connected to words of Anglo-Saxon derivation, without injury to propriety. Dead affixes, though they still appear in many words (coined when the affixes were still 'living'), would be out of place in any new words. Example: hittance, strikance, keepance. These coinages wouldn't work because -ance is no longer a living English suffix; if it is to be used at all, it should be with Latin words and in strict accordance with the rules of Latin word formation. Similarly, the Greek -o- is not living English.

    April 20, 2011

  • this is jargonautically jargonuts. welcome to the world wide jargonutery.

    April 20, 2011

  • Piffle. I say we scrap this "English" nonsense and go back to the language of civilization, culture, and learned thought, the language of poetry and pierogies, the language on which all other languages are based.... Es runāju latviešu valodā!

    April 20, 2011

  • here here! witchcraft.. burn the witch!

    April 20, 2011

  • Brīnišķīgs!

    April 20, 2011

  • The Wordikometer is going off the scale here.

    If you understood that sentence it's living English, is it not? Irregardless of how you might rail at the aesthetics.

    April 20, 2011

  • I don't think so. Words can live on even when the constituent parts of them are dead. For example, although the word tidal is very much alive, the -al suffix is no longer living English. To determine this we need only try to connect it to a word of English derivation, say, the word 'hill'. The result, hillal, is clearly a monstrosity. I would argue that -o-, in the same way, is not part of our living language, even though it occurs (correctly or incorrectly) in many English words; and so any new words which make use of this connecting element ought to follow Greek rules of word formation.

    April 20, 2011

  • Ak tā!

    April 20, 2011

  • English is an odd beast, get over it.

    It doesn't always make sense.. that said, i hate this word for being phonetically unappealing.

    April 20, 2011

  • I have never before missed so much in 4 hours.

    English isn't a language that follows rules as rigid as thsoe of Latin or classical Greek or even more modern languages like Italian and Spanish. The variety and spontaneity is what makes English such a special and unique language. I'm personally a big fan of it.

    I think this video sums things up nicely.

    April 20, 2011

  • -al and hill is a poor example because the root is so old that various derivatives are solidified hence the incongruity of hillal leads to obvious rejection.

    Consider something newer. "She might have threatened me, at least in the Twitteral sense." Here -al works partly because of the resultant similarity with literal but also partly because the -al you assume is dead simply aint. The truth is we can dust it off whenever we want, particularly in relation to formation of new words that are genuinely new...precisely as gasometer was at the time of its coinage.

    -o- is 'incorrect' in this context only for those who keep yowling like incredulous deflating banshees that it's incorrect. Gasometer appears in several dictionaries, has been around for hundreds of years, is not tricky to spell or pronounce, has a straightforward and plausible etymology and as I pointed out below is similar to cognates in French and Italian that appeared around the same time.

    There must be a degree of unpleasantness in passing through life fulminating at Language Realities That Perversely Refuse To Obey The Rules Of Purity, And Must Be Corrrrected so grab a fuflun from the pile and the top o' the afternoon to ya.

    ruzuzu - gasometer in Latvian : Gasometer

    April 20, 2011

  • PossibleUnderscore,

    I anticipated your argument and addressed it in a previous message. I make a distinction between living English and dead English, and explain when Latin and Greek rules of word formation are to be followed, and when they are to be ignored. The loosening of all the rules which have hitherto governed the English language is one reason why English literature is in such a hopeless muddle today.

    April 20, 2011

  • Paldies somainā žurka ar garām ausīm.

    April 20, 2011

  • Bilby,

    The word 'twitteral' is intended to be humourous. It is formed, not by analogy with other words ending in -al, but merely because it rhymes with literal. That it is intended to be funny only supports my argument.

    That the word 'gasometer' appears in dictionaries is hardly relevant. Dictionaries merely describe how people use the language, whether standard or substandard, not how they ought to use it. For the latter we consult style guides.

    April 20, 2011

  • ruzuzu, do you really speak Latvian? are you Latvian? ;)

    April 20, 2011

  • But -al clearly serves as an adjectival marker (compare, for example, Twitterage, which doesn't work due to being the wrong part of speech), hence is still productive in this structure as a functional morpheme.

    Standard or substandard is the essence of your argument and I'm saying that it's irrelevant. There's no evidence that gasometer is substandard now let alone centuries ago. People turned away from the public service because they wrote gasometer rather than gas metre on their exams? Human rights violated? Lives lost? Empires crumbled? Profits headed south faster than a homesick Adelie? Uhhh, no.

    Regardless of what you think about -o- formations, the fact is that they were considered acceptable (at some level, though perhaps not by classicists) at the time gasometer took traction and became commonly used. What you or any other twitchybrow prescribes is not the same as what history has written in the journal of every word. Collectively those histories tells us lots of important things about our language. Perhaps -o- words were/are a wrong turn in terms of classical formulation. The wrong turn has become a track has become a byway has become a gazetted road and an effective one at that; that 'hopeless muddle' is the most powerful language in the world today and still growing in influence.

    I think you might like Lolcat.

    April 20, 2011

  • PossibleUnderscore, that video got really good halfway through. ;)

    Bilby, for once.. you are making some sense.

    April 20, 2011

  • No! :-(

    Time I was outta here!

    *disappears into burrow*

    April 20, 2011

  • Bilby,

    Again, you assume that common usage alone determines legitimacy. That is not so. Incidentally,

    "There's no evidence that gasometer is substandard now let alone centuries ago."

    As early as 1809 we find William Creighton complaining of "that barbarous improper term Gasometer". The Electric Review (1908) speaks of "that incorrect word gasometer". Elsewhere we find it described as a "misnomer" and a "barbarous hybridism".

    April 20, 2011

  • I think we need a good party round about now to celebrate barbarous words. Who's with me? I guarantee plenty of phony umbrage, and fufluns. Maybe even some cupcakes with hyphens.

    I'll meet you over here.

    April 20, 2011

  • I think this whole conversation should be in French, since the word is directly adapted from French gazomètre (cf. etymology section).

    April 20, 2011

  • Whether French or English, it isn't consonant with Greek principles of word formation.

    It's just as objectionable in French as in English.

    April 20, 2011

  • Qu'est-ce que vous avez dit?

    Euphonic vowels are common in many languages and it seems to me that English is not an exception. In Japanese, Nihon becomes "Nippon" for ease of pronunciation, and hirakana becomes "hiragana" for similar reasons. Same in Italian.

    *Nibbles fuflun, yawns, leaves page*

    April 20, 2011

  • Mmmmmmmm, pierogies.

    April 20, 2011

  • @marky, my mother's side of the family was from Latvia and my father's side of the family was from West Omaha. This means that I'm constantly exposed to and amused by chauvinism.

    @doncry I know, right? Latvian pīrāgi are the best.

    April 20, 2011

  • @bilby I think that photograph you posted was photoshopped. (You can tell by looking at the length of the shadows.)

    April 20, 2011

  • Prescriptivism... bloody hell. *shakes head*

    April 20, 2011

  • @Possible_Underscore Belly up to the bar...barisms.

    April 20, 2011

  • @Progases Français est bon. Lettone, c'est mieux.

    April 20, 2011

  • *bellies up to the bar-o-meter*

    April 20, 2011

  • Muša, tur oficiants par manu pīrāgiem.

    April 20, 2011

  • gas-o(h)m- eter ga-so-meter: ga-some-ter: gaso-mete-r???

    April 21, 2011

  • gas-ah-met-r

    gas-ah-meh-ter

    April 21, 2011

  • *wanders in several hours late*

    Hey, do you have to speak French to go to the barbarism party?

    April 21, 2011

  • Ooh! I know that kind of French!

    April 21, 2011

  • Prolagus, "muša" was one of the first words I ever learned in any language.

    April 21, 2011

  • Shama shama, el mal kema ma.

    April 21, 2011

  • Thoughts about prescriptivism: I believe that everyone ought to be entitled to two or three linguistic pet peeves. Mine happens to be forte, born probably of my musical background making its Italian pronunciation by laymen sound dumb to my ears. With all that, all the time I've spent on other languages in the past years has been increasingly making me realise just how fiercely independent all of us English speakers are about our language, most of us quite unconsciously. The textbooks I teach out of for Georgian schoolchildren invent ten times as many rules to govern English than I've ever seen in any grammar or style guide; most of them happen to be true in a vague sense, but really they're just canons our language has adapted itself around while asleep, which our waking speakers and writers never bother to consider. Our fabled pronunciation, I feel more than ever, has to be indicative of the extreme sense of humour innate to the English speaking people; usage and syntax are only a little less lax. Even the strictest classicist will unassumingly use coinages and constructions that a Georgian speaker wouldn't even know how to blanch at: it simply wouldn't be possible. (This 'strictest classicist', incidentally, no longer truly exists; the breed flourished well in the Victorian Era, entered old age as airplanes left the ground, and perished its last specimens in the middle of the 20th century. Duckbill has a point that the literature of that time was quite certainly the most precise probably of any period of history so far, and possibly yet to come, lending an unwitting humourous colour which I enjoy very much; but there was just as much dreck in those days as there was in ours and Cromwell's.)

    Thoughts about "muša": the word in Georgian means "worker".

    April 22, 2011

  • "'I have never smelled anything like it, with the possible exception of a beached whale,' Twain went on, warming to his subject. 'It was rancid, rank, and malodorous beyond words. It would incite rebellion in a gasometer.'"
    Test of Time by Charles Harrington Elster

    April 26, 2011

  • You're such a barbar!

    April 26, 2011

  • Careful what you're accusing, Pro. Barbar might not be acceptable Greek, even with a side of dolmadaki.

    April 27, 2011

  • a barred barbar?

    April 27, 2011

  • gasm-eater.

    April 27, 2011

  • gasometer in Croatian: gasmetar

    April 27, 2011

  • thank you bilby.

    April 30, 2011

  • You don't need a gasometer to know which way the wind blows...

    May 2, 2011

  • At least not in my house.

    May 2, 2011

  • Those *are* lovely Flickr photos.

    September 29, 2011