Analogous

How to spell analogous

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce analogous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does analogous mean?

1. adjectiveComparable in certain respects, so that a useful parallel can be drawn between two otherwise different things.

Analogous in a sentence

• The human heart is often described as analogous to a mechanical pump.

• The consultant argued that the two markets were analogous and would react in similar ways.

Where does analogous come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reaches English from the Greek analogos, meaning 'proportionate' or 'in due ratio', which was built from ana- 'according to' and logos, a wide-ranging word meaning 'ratio', 'reckoning', and 'word'. To the Greeks the idea was strictly mathematical: two things were analogos when they stood in the same proportion to one another. Latin took it as analogus, and English adopted it in the early 1600s, where the meaning broadened from precise numerical proportion to any kind of resemblance or correspondence between things that are otherwise different. The same logos root sits inside a whole family of English words such as 'logic', 'dialogue', and 'analogy', the noun to which 'analogous' is the matching adjective. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed endings: the soft, schwa-coloured '-gous' is easily misheard and the temptation is to write '-gus' or '-guous'.

How the word is built

• ana- (according to, in proportion)
• log (ratio, reasoning, from Greek logos)
• -ous (adjective suffix)