Talk:Etymology of electricity

As a scientific topic, this page is already covered by 'Electric Charge'. The present page is aimed at conceptual problems and semantic misunderstandings regarding the original scientific definition of "electricity" as meaning "charge", as opposed to its definition as energy or electric current --Wjbeaty 01:11, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)

Can you highlight terms like this or this or this instead of capitalizing them? I know the units should definitely be lowercase, but not sure about Electricity or Quantity of Electricity. - Omegatron 17:25, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)

I like the tone of this page and belief it is making a very important point. - Learner1111 (talk) 17:53, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I do not think the article conveys its subject well. It seems specious, and has noticeable errors of various kinds, such as capitalization, etc. 24.13.70.203 (talk) 02:30, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm voting in favour of both the tone (earnest but in a moderately active voice) and the validity of this article. The drift of the meaning of a subject as vital to our lives as electricity is surely worth a page to itself. In no way specious, and I'm totally comfortable with the capitalisation. Lonesometwin (talk) 13:58, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Self-inflicted sink hole
I have significant problems with the section "Conceptional problems".

First, this article makes no mention of the word "electronics", those rather important industrial artefacts which depend for their operation on a mysterious something sometimes in short supply (ask anyone in Africa if "electricity delivery" is a real thing.)

What makes electronics different from other classes of industrial artefacts? Mobile charge carriers. So it seems to me simple enough to think of electricity in the main as "the physics of mobile charger carriers".

Now if historically the word "electricity" has been applied somewhat imprecisely, this is because we didn't have a complete physical analysis (breaking into parts) of the phenomena in hand for a long time.

I don't agree that the original physical meaning of electricity was "charge", but rather "pertinent behaviour of the charge" (all of which now have better and more precise names), and furthermore meaning specifically the mobile charge, in the same way that a reservoir engineer means by water "free water" almost all of the time, and not the water bound within mineral rocks.

There it is: electricity is a broad set of phenomena associated with the physics of charge migration, whose analytic properties became increasingly clear with time. What's the big hang up? &mdash; MaxEnt 02:55, 9 February 2016 (UTC)


 * There are multiple claims about how the word electricity was used historically, and how it is used now. The fundamental problem is not whether the claims are right or wrong, but that it is original research in the form of an essay by an editor.  This either needs sourcing or heavily pruning, or possibly a bit of both. SpinningSpark 23:18, 12 June 2020 (UTC)