means The standard unit of electric potential difference, measuring the 'push' that drives current through a circuit.

from Named in honor of Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who built the first true battery (the 'voltaic pile') around 1800. His rival Luigi Galvani believed twitching frog legs proved animals carried their own 'animal electricity'; Volta argued the electricity came from the metals touching the frog, not the frog itself — and proved it by making a pile of metal discs that produced steady current with no frog required. The unit 'volt' was adopted internationally in the early 1880s to honor him.