Aviation and flight operations

« Fuselage » is one of the few words on this list that English neither built nor translated. It was taken from French in the first years of powered flight and has kept its spelling and its French ending, which is why it sounds technical rather than descriptive. In French it is neither. Le fuselage is built on the adjective fuselé, tapered — thick in the middle and drawn out at both ends — and fuselé is built in turn on le fuseau, the spindle a spinner winds thread on. The word therefore says what the thing looks like, and any French reader who has seen a spindle can see the aircraft in it. English keeps the same picture in a corner it rarely visits: « fusiform », said of a muscle or a bacterium, comes from Latin fusus, that same spindle. The everyday English word for the shape is « spindle-shaped », which nobody would put on an aeroplane, and so « fuselage » stays a label where French has a description.