Abandonment

How to spell abandonment

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce abandonment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does abandonment mean?

1. nounThe act of giving something or someone up completely, or the state of having been deserted.

Abandonment in a sentence

• The court treated his sudden abandonment of the family as a serious matter.

• Years of abandonment had left the old factory crumbling and overgrown.

Where does abandonment come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back to the Old French verb abandoner, which came from the phrase 'a bandon', meaning roughly 'under someone's control' or 'at one's discretion'. The element 'bandon' was tied to 'ban', a term for a proclamation, jurisdiction, or power of command, itself rooted in a Germanic source. To put something 'a bandon' was to place it entirely at another's mercy, which gradually shifted to the idea of giving it up completely. English took on the verb abandon in the late 1300s, and the noun abandonment was formed later, around the 1600s, by adding the familiar French-derived suffix -ment that turns an action into a thing. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle and final vowels, both sounding like a vague 'uh', so writers must remember the 'o' in '-don-' and that the ending is '-ment', not '-mant'.

How the word is built

• a- (from Old French 'a bandon': under control)
• bandon (power, jurisdiction)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)