airfoil

air·foil | \ ˈer-ˌfȯi(-ə)l

How to pronounce airfoil (audio)

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Definition of airfoil

: a body (such as an airplane wing or propeller blade) designed to provide a desired reaction force when in motion relative to the surrounding air

Examples of airfoil in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web What dominates the room, though, is a big, red ceiling fan, 14 feet wide with airfoil tips. — Judy Rose, Detroit Free Press, "$1.1M Shelby Township home is one of the most visually striking in SE Michigan," 23 Nov. 2019 Trailing behind that is a thin airfoil covered by the second electrode. — John Timmer, Ars Technica, "Ion drive meets drone, as small plane flies with no moving parts," 21 Nov. 2018 On either side of the body, hanging off the wing, was a series of the wire/airfoil ionizers (two rows from front to back, both in a column of four for a total of eight). — John Timmer, Ars Technica, "Ion drive meets drone, as small plane flies with no moving parts," 21 Nov. 2018 The above image shows the computational grid, rendered as blue lines, as well as the airfoil and the flow solution, showing how the grid adapts itself to the flow. — Lee Phillips, Ars Technica, "Turbulence, the oldest unsolved problem in physics," 10 Oct. 2018 In the bowing airfoil shape, air moving over the longer, curved side moves faster than air flowing by the other side, generating lift. — Popular Mechanics, "The Beginner's Guide To Sailing," 18 May 2018 The aircraft design uses Honda's over-the-wing engine mount, developed on the original HondaJet, as well as a composite fuselage and natural laminar flow airfoil. — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, "Honda's New Business Jet Has Longer Range—and a Toilet Seatbelt," 30 May 2018 How Wind Moves a Boat A sail full of wind forms an airfoil and propels the boat with lift, the way a plane’s wing does (except across water, rather than into the air). — Popular Mechanics, "The Beginner's Guide To Sailing," 18 May 2018 Domel, Saadat and other colleagues working at Harvard biology professor George Lauder’s lab used 3-D printing to recreate the shape of shortfin mako shark denticles onto an airfoil. — Sydney Pereira, Newsweek, "To Fly Faster, Humans Look to the Mysteries of Shark Skin," 7 Feb. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'airfoil.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

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Last Updated

28 Nov 2019

Cite this Entry

“Airfoil.” The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Inc., https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/airfoil. Accessed 17 January 2020.

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