A device that stores chemical energy and changes it into electricity to power things like phones, flashlights, and cars. It can also mean a group of similar things arranged together, such as a group of guns in the military.
It comes from Old French “batterie,” meaning a beating or group of cannons, from “battre,” to beat. The electrical sense grew from the idea of a “battery” of linked components working together.
The first “batteries” weren’t about electricity at all; they were about things that “battered” or struck, like cannons. The name for your phone’s power source still carries the sense of many small units “attacking” a problem together.
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