Agility

How to spell agility

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce agility

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does agility mean?

1. nounThe ability to move quickly and easily, or to think and adapt with speed.

Agility in a sentence

• The gymnast trained for years to build her remarkable agility.

• Mental agility helped him solve the puzzle far faster than his colleagues.

Where does agility come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Agility entered English in the late 1500s from the French agilité, which in turn came from the Latin agilitas, meaning 'nimbleness' or 'quickness'. That noun was built on the adjective agilis, 'easily moved' or 'quick', which derived from the verb agere, meaning 'to do', 'to drive', or 'to set in motion'. The same agere root is remarkably productive in English, surfacing in everyday words such as 'agent', 'act', 'agitate', and 'agenda', all of them carrying a sense of doing or driving forward. The spelling trap lies in the soft 'g' followed by 'ility': the unstressed middle syllables collapse in speech, so writers must remember the single 'l' and the '-ity' ending rather than '-ility' guesses. The original physical idea of bodily quickness later broadened to describe mental sharpness and, more recently, the flexibility of organisations and software teams.

How the word is built

• agil- (from agilis: nimble, quick)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix denoting a quality or state)