Captivity

How to spell captivity

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce captivity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does captivity mean?

1. nounThe state of being imprisoned or confined, unable to leave or escape.

Captivity in a sentence

• The rescued lions had spent their entire lives in captivity.

• The prisoner wrote a memoir about his years of captivity.

Where does captivity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin captivitas, meaning 'the state of being a prisoner', which was built on captivus, 'taken captive' or 'held prisoner'. That adjective in turn came from the verb capere, meaning 'to take' or 'to seize', a root that gives us a whole family of English words including capture, captive, and even capacious. English picked up captivity in the late 1300s, partly through Old French captivite, and it kept its literal sense of confinement against one's will. Over time it broadened beyond human imprisonment to describe animals kept in zoos or enclosures rather than living in the wild. The single c in the middle and the steady -tiv- spelling are clues to that capere root, which is the same seizing idea sitting inside capture.

How the word is built

• captiv- (from Latin captivus: taken prisoner)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or condition)