Ascent

How to spell ascent

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ascent

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ascent mean?

1. nounAn act of climbing or rising upward, or the upward slope or route taken.

Ascent in a sentence

• The final ascent to the summit took the climbers nearly five hours.

• The plane began its steep ascent shortly after leaving the runway.

Where does ascent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word ascent traces back to the Latin verb ascendere, meaning 'to climb up', which was formed from ad- 'to, up' and scandere 'to climb'. English took in the verb 'ascend' during the 1300s, and the noun 'ascent' was then shaped in the 1500s by direct analogy with 'descent', its opposite. The same scandere root climbs through a whole family of English words, including 'descend', 'scandal' (originally a stumbling block to trip over), and 'scan' (which first meant to mark out the rising and falling feet of a line of verse). The 'sc' spelling preserves that climbing root, and the ending follows 'descent' with -ent rather than the -ent of its sound-alike. Note the trap: ascent sounds exactly like 'assent', meaning agreement, so the double s of agreement must not creep into the single-s spelling of climbing.

How the word is built

• a- (up, to, from Latin ad-)
• scent (climb, from scandere: to climb)
• -ent (noun ending)