Negawatt
noun, slang ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A unit of saved energy. informal
"And he has suggested ways to help consumers buy the so-called time-of-use-meters […] so they can benefit from using energy at off-peak times and through "negawatts," or credits for not using power."
Example
More examples"And he has suggested ways to help consumers buy the so-called time-of-use-meters […] so they can benefit from using energy at off-peak times and through "negawatts," or credits for not using power."
Etymology
Coined by Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute as a contraction of negative watt on the model of similar compounds like megawatt, by surface analysis, nega- + watt. Lovins credited the term to a typo in a document by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission in which the word "megawatt" was misspelled.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.