Attractiveness

How to spell attractiveness

14 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce attractiveness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does attractiveness mean?

1. nounThe quality of being pleasing, appealing, or able to draw interest and admiration.

Attractiveness in a sentence

• The brochure highlighted the attractiveness of the seaside town to summer visitors.

• Investors judged the deal on its long-term attractiveness rather than quick profit.

Where does attractiveness come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb trahere, which literally meant 'to draw' or 'to pull along', and its past participle tractus. Adding the prefix ad-, meaning 'to' or 'toward', gave attrahere, 'to draw toward', so something attractive quite literally pulls you in its direction. English took attract from this Latin stem in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, originally in the physical sense of magnetism and gravity drawing objects together, before the figurative sense of drawing people's interest or admiration took hold. The adjective attractive then gained the suffix -ive (tending to do something) and finally -ness (the quality of being), stacking up into the abstract noun attractiveness. The same trahere root surfaces in a whole family of relatives such as tractor, extract, contract and subtract, all involving a pulling or drawing action. The spelling trap is the doubled t at the start, inherited from the ad- prefix assimilating against the t of tract.

How the word is built

• at- (form of ad-: to, toward)
• tract (from trahere: to draw or pull)
• -ive (adjective suffix: tending to)
• -ness (noun suffix: quality of)