Conductance

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The ability of a substance to permit the flow of electric charge through it A measure of a material’s effectiveness in conducting electricity The extent to which electrical current can pass through a given medium
2. A physical property indicating how easily electricity flows through a material
3. The characteristic of a substance that quantifies its capacity to allow electrical current

Etymology: Oliver Heaviside, the self-taught English electrical engineer and physicist, coined "conductance" in 1885, and he did it by building on a word that was already in use. Electrical conduction had been studied for decades before he gave this quantity its name, but the term itself is his. The word is made from "conduct" and the suffix "-ance," which forms nouns of state or quality from verbs, as in "resist" and "resistance" or "maintain" and "maintenance." Heaviside's choice fit the pattern neatly: "conductance" names the capacity of a material to let charge flow, in the same way "resistance" names the capacity to oppose it. Because the two terms are built from the same kind of suffix, they sit as natural partners in circuit theory, and "conductance" is in fact the reciprocal of resistance.

Synonyms: conductivity