Spectrometer

//spɛkˈtɹɒm.ɪ.tə// noun

noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An optical instrument for measuring the absorption of light by chemical substances; typically it will plot a graph of absorption versus wavelength or frequency, and the patterns produced are used to identify the substances present, and their internal structure.
  2. 2
    spectroscope for obtaining a mass spectrum by deflecting ions into a thin slit and measuring the ion current with an electrometer wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
mass spectrometermass spectrometer

Example

More examples

"Using a special instrument called a spectrometer, observations of Eris show it has frozen methane on its surface."

Etymology

From spectro- + -meter.

Related phrases

X-ray spectrometermass spectrometer

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.