Acquisition

How to spell acquisition

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce acquisition

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does acquisition mean?

1. nounThe act of gaining or obtaining something, or the thing that has been gained.

Acquisition in a sentence

• The company announced the acquisition of a smaller rival.

• The museum's latest acquisition is a rare seventeenth-century map.

Where does acquisition come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin acquisitio, meaning 'a gaining' or 'an obtaining', which was built on the verb acquirere, 'to get in addition' or 'to gain'. That verb joins the prefix ad-, meaning 'to' or 'toward', with quaerere, meaning 'to seek, ask, or strive for', so the literal sense was 'to seek something and add it to what you already have'. English took the word in through Old French and Latin in the late 1300s, first for the act of getting and later for the thing actually obtained. The same quaerere root sits inside a whole family of English words, including 'inquire', 'require', and 'conquest', which is a useful reminder of where the spelling comes from. The tricky 'cq' cluster is a direct fossil of that Latin ad- meeting the qu- of quaerere, and that is exactly the spot that trips writers up.

How the word is built

• ac- (to, from Latin ad-)
• quis (from quaerere: to seek or obtain)
• -ition (noun-forming suffix)