Semiconductor technology

The sixth entry is o hiato de energia, and the noun in the middle is a word an English reader already owns, although in a much quieter job. « Hiatus » here is nearly always a pause in time: a career hiatus, a hiatus between two series, and the tone is mild. The Latin hiatus was not a pause at all. It is the noun of hiare, to gape or to stand open, and what it named was an opening — a cleft in the ground, a mouth held wide. Portuguese kept that physical reading and put it to work here, where o hiato is a real distance an electron has to clear before the material will carry any current. The same open mouth reached English by a second road, out of Greek rather than Latin: khásma gave « chasm » and kháos gave « chaos », which began as the yawning void and only afterwards came to mean disorder. So a reader who finds « hiatus » too mild for what this page describes need only remember which of the three relatives it is.