Agenda

How to spell agenda

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce agenda

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does agenda mean?

1. nounA list of items to be discussed or dealt with at a meeting.
2. nounA person's or group's underlying plan, set of goals, or hidden motive.

Agenda in a sentence

• The chair circulated the agenda a day before the board meeting.

• Critics accused the company of pursuing a political agenda behind the policy.

• Staffing costs were the first item on the agenda.

• She insisted she had no hidden agenda in offering the loan.

Where does agenda come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Agenda comes straight from Latin, where it was the neuter plural of agendum, meaning literally 'a thing that must be done'. That form was built on the verb agere, 'to do, to act, or to drive forward', the same root that powers a whole family of English words including 'act', 'agent', 'agile', and 'agitate'. In Latin the gerundive carried the sense of obligation, so agenda meant 'the things needing to be done', and the word arrived in English in the 1600s, at first treated as a true plural for a set of items to be dealt with. Over time English speakers came to feel agenda as a single thing, a list, so today we say 'an agenda' and even form a new plural 'agendas', a quiet shift that has worried Latin purists ever since. The spelling stays close to its Latin parent, with a single g and the tell-tale -nda ending that marks its 'things to be done' origin. From the literal list of business it later picked up the figurative sense of a person's underlying plan or motive, as in a 'hidden agenda'.

How the word is built

• ag- (from Latin agere: to do, to drive)
• -nda (gerundive plural ending: things to be done)