Adjacent

How to spell adjacent

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce adjacent

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does adjacent mean?

1. adjectiveLying next to or near something, sharing a common boundary or edge.

Adjacent in a sentence

• The hotel booked us into two adjacent rooms on the same floor.

• The car park is adjacent to the train station, so the walk is short.

Where does adjacent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Adjacent comes from the Latin adjacens, the present participle of the verb adjacere, which literally meant 'to lie near' or 'to border on'. That verb was formed from ad- 'to, towards, near' joined to jacere 'to lie' or 'to throw down', so the underlying image is of one thing lying right beside another. English took the word in during the fifteenth century, at first in formal and geographical contexts describing lands or territories that bordered one another. The same jacere root survives in a surprising spread of English words, including 'project', 'reject', and 'adjective', all of which carry that idea of throwing or placing. Remembering that buried jac element, the part that means 'lie', helps explain why the middle of the word is spelled with a 'j' rather than the 'g' a speller might expect from the soft sound.

How the word is built

• ad- (to, near)
• jac (from Latin jacere: to lie)
• -ent (adjective suffix)