Abomination

How to spell abomination

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce abomination

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does abomination mean?

1. nounA thing that causes intense disgust, loathing, or moral revulsion.

Abomination in a sentence

• The cheap plastic extension on the heritage house was an architectural abomination.

• Critics called the new tax policy an abomination that punished the poorest families.

Where does abomination come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb abominari, which meant 'to deprecate as a bad omen' or 'to recoil from as ill-fated'. It was built from ab-, meaning 'away from', and omen, the very same word the Romans used for a sign believed to foretell the future. So at its root an abomination was literally something so dreadful that you wished it away as an evil portent. English borrowed it through Old French in the 1300s as abominacioun, and for centuries scholars wrongly assumed it came from the Latin homo (man), spelling it 'abhomination' and reading it as something 'inhuman'; that mistaken theory faded, and the original single-letter spelling with the buried omen returned. The trickiest part for spellers is precisely that hidden 'omin' in the middle, an unstressed run of vowels where the 'i' is easy to drop or swap.

How the word is built

• ab- (away, from)
• omin (omen, a sign foretelling something)
• -ation (noun-forming suffix)