megawatt

• mega-watt

From mega- +‎ watt.

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megawatt (plural megawatts)

2. One million (1 000 000) watts, an amount of power large enough to power such things as an entire commercial building or a small passenger aircraft. (Consuming 1 megawatt during a duration of 1 hour consumes 1 megawatt-hour of energy.)

   Alternative form: MW (symbol)

   Holonyms: GW, gigawatt < TW, terawatt < PW, petawatt

   Meronyms: mW, milliwatt < W, watt < kW, kilowatt

   • 2004, Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, page 197:

     Not long after the feds started regulating radio, Mexico's megawatt border blasters—high-powered stations planted just south of Texas and California—started beckoning. The FCC couldn't control them […]

   • 2007 July 25, Felicity Barringer, “California Utility Agrees to Buy Power Generated by Solar Array”, in The New York Times‎^[1]:

     SAN FRANCISCO, July 23 — Pacific Gas & Electric, Northern California’s major utility, is announcing a commitment on Wednesday to purchase 550 megawatts of solar power to be generated by troughlike arrays of mirrors spread over nine square miles in the Mojave Desert.

   • 2025 September 8, “The promise and peril of Ethiopia's new mega-dam: It could power the region or plunge it into another conflict”, in The Economist‎^[2]:

     In theory, the GERD could boost the region's economy [Horn of Africa and eastern North Africa]. At full capacity, it could generate close to 6,000 megawatts of electricity, double Ethiopia's entire output before the dam was built. Currently, just over 22% of the country's 122m people are connected to the grid. The dam could supply millions more with power, both in Ethiopia and through power deals with neighbouring countries. […] That will happen only if Ethiopia builds better transmission lines to connect more people to the grid and to send more power to its neighbours. At the moment the main beneficiaries of the power surplus generated by the dam are miners of cryptocurrencies. […] Their data centres, which have their own power lines, are expected to consume nearly a third of the country's electricity this year. Meanwhile, most electricity-deprived Ethiopians will probably have to wait years for their grid connection. At the current pace of expansion, the national power company expects just 27% of households to be connected by 2030, far off the national target of 96%.

• Attributive use modifying smile or similar nouns are due to watt as measure of the power used by a lightbulb, and hence of its brilliance, by analogy to smiles and the like.

From mega- +‎ watt.

• IPA^(key): [ˈmɛɡavat]

megawatt m inan

1. megawatt

• “megawatt”, in Kartotéka Novočeského lexikálního archivu (in Czech)
• “megawatt”, in Slovník spisovného jazyka českého (in Czech), 1960–1971, 1989

mega- +‎ watt

megawatt

1. megawatt

• “megawatt” in Den Danske Ordbog

From mega- +‎ watt.

• Audio:

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megawatt

1. megawatt

Unadapted borrowing from English megawatt. By surface analysis, mega- +‎ watt.

• IPA^(key): /ˈmɛ.ɡa.vat/, /ˌmɛ.ɡaˈvat/^[1][2]
• Rhymes: -ɛɡavat, -at

megawatt m (invariable)

1. megawatt

• megawatt in Dizionario Italiano Olivetti, Olivetti Media Communication

From mega- +‎ watt.

megawatt

1. megawatt

• “megawatt”, in DEX online—Dicționare ale limbii române (Dictionaries of the Romanian language) (in Romanian), 2004–2025

From mega- +‎ watt.

megawatt m inan (relational adjective megawattový)

1. megawatt

• “megawatt”, in Slovníkový portál Jazykovedného ústavu Ľ. Štúra SAV [Dictionary portal of the Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Science] (in Slovak), https://slovnik.juls.savba.sk, 2003–2025

mega- +‎ watt

• IPA^(key): /meːɡavat/, /mɛɡavat/

megawatt

1. megawatt

• megawatt in Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB)