potential difference

Questions about potential difference

What does potential difference mean?

potential difference means "the difference in electrical charge between two points in a circuit expressed in volts".

What is another word for potential difference?

Close synonyms include electric potential, potential, potential drop, voltage. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is potential difference a common word?

potential difference is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.