Agricultural

How to spell agricultural

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce agricultural

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does agricultural mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to farming or the cultivation of land and crops.

Agricultural in a sentence

• The region depends heavily on agricultural exports such as wheat and barley.

• New agricultural machinery has cut the time needed to harvest the fields.

Where does agricultural come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin agricultura, a compound of ager, meaning 'field' or 'farmland', and cultura, meaning 'cultivation' or 'tending', itself from colere, 'to till, care for, or grow'. The adjective form agricultural was assembled in English in the 1600s by adding the familiar Latin-derived ending -al to the noun agriculture, which had entered the language a little earlier from the same Latin source, partly by way of French. The first element ager is the very same root that gives us 'agrarian' and even, more distantly, the place-name element seen in words about land and acreage. The middle portion, cultur, is a close relative of 'culture', 'cultivate', and 'colony', all of which share the sense of caring for, growing, or settling. The spelling trap sits in that long unstressed middle: writers must remember the -cultur- block (echoing 'culture') before the -al, and the single i in agri-, not the doubled or altered vowels people sometimes expect.

How the word is built

• agri- (from Latin ager: field, land)
• cultur (from cultura: cultivation, tending)
• -al (adjective suffix)