Aquarium

How to spell aquarium

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce aquarium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does aquarium mean?

1. nounA glass tank or building in which fish and other water creatures are kept and displayed.

Aquarium in a sentence

• The children pressed their faces to the glass of the aquarium to watch the sharks.

• He cleaned the gravel and refilled the aquarium before adding the new goldfish.

Where does aquarium come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from Latin aquarium, which originally referred to a watering place or trough for cattle. It was the neuter form of the adjective aquarius, meaning 'belonging to water', built on the noun aqua, the ordinary Latin word for 'water'. English adopted it in the early 1800s as a general term for an artificial pond, and the modern sense of a glass tank for keeping fish and plants settled in by the middle of that century. The same aqua root waters a whole family of English words, including aquatic, aqueduct, and aquamarine. The spelling trap lives in the ending: the Latin place-suffix -arium gives 'arium', not the 'orium' that some writers expect by analogy with words like auditorium.

How the word is built

• aqua- (water)
• -arium (place for, container)