helicopter

If you asked someone to break the word helicopter into its root parts, they’d probably separate it into heli and copter, and it’s understandable why they’d do this: as a result of the word helicopter, we have heli- as a word part, as in helipad, and we have copter existing on its own, as an abbreviated form of helicopter but also in derived terms such as gyrocopter. The etymology of helicopter is surprising, however, because the word actually splits into helico and pter, the former being a Latinized form of the Greek word helix, “spiral,” and the latter from the Greek pteron, “wing,” as in pterodactyl. A helicopter is literally a spinning wing.