Anticipation

How to spell anticipation

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce anticipation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anticipation mean?

1. nounThe feeling of looking forward to or expecting something to happen.

Anticipation in a sentence

• The crowd waited in anticipation for the band to take the stage.

• In anticipation of a busy weekend, she stocked the fridge on Friday.

Where does anticipation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb anticipare, which meant to take or seize something in advance, to act before someone else does. That verb was built from ante, meaning 'before', and capere, meaning 'to take' or 'to seize', so the literal idea was 'to take beforehand'. The noun anticipatio described the act of getting ahead of an event, and English borrowed the word in the 1500s, at first carrying the sense of forestalling or pre-empting something. Over time the meaning softened from physically grabbing in advance to the mental act of expecting, looking forward, or preparing for what is to come. The very same capere root sits inside familiar relatives such as capture, capable, and recipient, and notice that English settled on the 'anti' spelling here even though the meaning is really 'ante', 'before', which is a small trap when the unstressed middle of the word blurs in speech.

How the word is built

• anti- (from ante-, before)
• cip (from capere, to take/seize)
• -ation (noun-forming suffix)