Accommodation

How to spell accommodation

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce accommodation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does accommodation mean?

1. nounA place to live or stay, such as a room, flat, or hotel.
2. nounAn adjustment, arrangement, or compromise that adapts to someone's needs.

Accommodation in a sentence

• The conference fee covers meals but not accommodation for the night.

• The employer made a reasonable accommodation for the worker's disability.

• Finding affordable accommodation near the city centre proved difficult.

• The two sides reached a workable accommodation after long talks.

Where does accommodation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin verb accommodare, meaning 'to make fit' or 'to adapt one thing to another'. That verb was assembled from ad, meaning 'to', the prefix com, meaning 'with' or 'together', and modus, meaning 'measure' or 'proper proportion', so the literal idea was bringing things into measured agreement. English borrowed the noun in the late sixteenth century, first in the broad sense of an adjustment or convenient arrangement, and only later did the everyday sense of lodging (a place arranged for your comfort) become dominant in British usage. The same modus root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'mode', 'modest', and 'modify', which is a useful reminder that the core idea is fitting and measuring. The notorious spelling trap, the doubled c followed by the doubled m, comes straight from the Latin prefix com- being attached to a stem that already began with a hard c sound, so both consonants genuinely double; remembering 'two cots and two mattresses' helps fix it.

How the word is built

• ac- (variant of ad-, meaning 'to')
• com- (with, together)
• mod (measure, fit)
• -ation (noun suffix)