The Italian government wants to change the name of the international unit of electrical potential from "volt" to "volta," to pay tribute to Italian electricity pioneer Alessandro Volta two centuries after his death.
Volta, who is credited with inventing the electric battery and discovering methane, had the "volt" named after him — but in Anglicized form.
Now, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wants to re-nationalize it by restoring the errant "a".
this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Would the plural be "volte"?
*Voltae
Hmm, I think Volti assuming Volta is masculine: https://connex-ita.com/plural-in-italian/
Voltae looks more like Latin. Romani ite domum!
Italian here. Plural would still be Volta, because it already is in a sense. Now, for the actual words "volta" meaning vault, arch, and "volta" meaning "time" (as in "that time we did that"), then the plural is "volte".
Now write it out a hundred times!
I do not know Italian, but I'd be surprised if a word ending on "a" were masculine. Usually, "a" indicates feminine, making the plural "e"
Ancient Romans gobbled a lot of classical greek; the masculine -a nouns are usually greek origin (sistema, tema, problema), but they are the exception.
Volta is a proper name, though, so there wouldn't be any rules.
It would be neutrum in German. (the forbidden sex)
Voltae would be Latin, in Italian, Volte is the correct plural.
In German it would be Voltae.
And now let the Italian and the German far right fight over it.
Yeah let's rename everything with the name of the one who discovered it!
I bet that'll be fun.
Finally they stopped wasting time and got down to the serious issues of the country!
Give it a week, the US will respond by renaming it to freedom shocks instead
"We're getting rid of election, and we don't want our citizens to be reminded of the past everytime they turn on the lamp."
It's him it's named after anyway, so I can see the logic in them wanting to do that.
Kind of weird it hasn't been called that all along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta
electric potential is named the volt in his honour.
am i the only one who thinks "volta" sounds much much worse as a unit? Like, there's a reason people say "amp" instead of "ampere", we don't like saying needlessly long words all the time.
Even if you change the official name i'm almost certain it'll just get shortened back down.
In my country nobody says Amp, we all say Ampere, an Volta sounds absolutely fine, IDK why it was anglicized?
Imagine looking for a Philip screwdriver.
Here's the flipping screwdriver. 🪛
Not that that's a flat! I said PHILIP not flipping!
Thank god it's Philips with an s. 🙏
But what you really wanted was a pozidriv
I had to look that up, but yes absolutely.
Here we actually don't normally call them Philips, but "star" screwdrivers, star being "stjerne" in Danish.
An even better question is "Why would countries not be allowed to localize standardized words for their own languages?"
Would it seriously be a problem if Italy used "volta" and the U.S. used "volt"?
Has it been a problem with France using "litre" and Italy and Spain using "litro" and the U.S. using "liter"?
I think it's a science thing, just like in biology and medicine they use latin, and math has standardized symbols.
Standards are cool, and the standard for the French litre is liter, despite the liter is of French origin as part of the metric system. And was defined as litre in France in 1793, where the name was based on the older french litron.
For some weird reason these standards are almost always anglified no matter what their origins were?
I suppose Italy is free to use Volta, but it is not the agreed upon international standard.
Basically Italians "Gulf of America".
If you have nothing achieved to be proud of, you can only be proud of the country you were accidentally born in...
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."
Albert Einstein
I couldn't agree more, except that measles is already the measles of mankind.
And there is a vaccine that could make measles extinct - if it was applied globally.
PARIS — The Italian government wants to change the name of the international unit of electrical potential from "volt" to "volta," to pay tribute to Italian electricity pioneer Alessandro Volta two centuries after his death.
Well then I have good news for ya, "volt" was already named after the dude, so this task is already done
I think you may have missed the next part of the article where they explain they specifically want to change the spelling to include the a in the official name of the unit
Shouldn't it be "volto" since he was a man?
On the one hand, I don't really care about the name or have any sentimental attachment to Volts over Voltas, and I can totally get behind naming the unit 1:1 with the guy's name rather than anglicizing it for no real reason.
On the other hand, it was two British scientists that coined the term, honoring the Italian scientist more than 3 decades after his death (though, interestingly, they originally used it for units of resistance, a.k.a. ohms, rather than the unit of electrical force it is now). It is not as if Volta himself wanted to name a unit in his own honor, or that he or anyone else initially called it a volta and then it was bastardized later.
So it really seems like this has nothing at all to do with Volta himself and honoring him, which the current name still does. Rather it seems it's stupid nationalistic posturing about rejecting the international cooperations and influences of science and proping up Italian scientific achievement in particlar.
Also while it's true that the vast majority of units honoring scientists' names are 1:1 to their namesake, including some that probably could've done with some abbreviation (looking at you, goeppert-mayer), volt is also not the only unit to have been abbreviated from their namesake. Farad (Faraday), bel/decibel (Bell), poise (Poiseuille), baud (Baudot), neper (Nepier), torr (Torricelli), Cartesian coordinates (Descartes), bark scale (Barkhausen)... probably more. He's got company.
Really focusing on serious issues I see /s
I'm all for this
You say volta, I say voltamort
That’s… not going to happen lol
Why not?
The headline is misleading. They just want to change the Italian word for volt to Volta, since that was the man’s actual name in his native Italian
Not the person you replied to but I imagine the SI will not change the name, and so scientists will not use "volta", so Italian schools will not want to each "volta".
I don’t think there will be much difference, since an Italian teacher would already pronounce volt as volt-a.
doesn't seem that bad , sounds better actually !
Iay inkthay atthay I'llay artstay allingcay itay 'oltavay'.
While we're at it, let's change the name of North America to Amerigo del Nord.
Next thing you know, they are going to want English speakers to say Roma instead of Rome, Napoli instead of Naples, and so on.
It's almost like they want everybody to use special pronouns for Italy.
Many countries do or did something like that already though? Like Peking -> Beijing, Ivory Coast -> Cote d'Ivore, Turkey -> Türkiye and so on.
oh my god, they want everyone to turn into my mother
Rivolta to volt for tribute to Volta