Insulator: meaning, definitions and examples

Commonly used in everyday language and in general contexts to refer to materials that do not conduct electricity or heat well.

• The house's walls are lined with a high-quality insulator to keep the heat in during winter.
• Rubber is an excellent insulator used for covering electrical wires.

More commonly used in scientific contexts to describe materials that do not conduct electricity, often synonymous with 'insulator' but less commonly used in everyday language.

• Wood and glass are classified as nonconductors of electricity.
• The laboratory experiment aimed to identify substances that are nonconductors.

Typically used in technical and engineering contexts to describe a device that isolates a system or component to prevent the transfer of electricity, sound, or vibration.

• Engineers installed an isolator to prevent the machinery vibrations from affecting the building structure.
• Electrical isolators are crucial for safe maintenance work on high-voltage power lines.

Primarily used in scientific contexts such as physics and engineering to describe a material that can be polarized by an electric field, often in capacitors.

• The capacitor uses a dielectric between its plates to store energy.
• In this experiment, we measured the dielectric constant of various materials.