Cavity

How to spell cavity

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cavity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cavity mean?

1. nounAn empty or hollow space within a solid body or structure.
2. nounA decayed hole that forms in a tooth.

Cavity in a sentence

• The surveyor found a hidden cavity behind the brick wall.

• The dentist spotted a cavity during the routine checkup.

• Engineers filled the cavity in the concrete with expanding foam.

• Too much sugar can lead to a painful cavity in a back molar.

Where does cavity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin cavus, meaning 'hollow' or 'empty', which gave rise to the late Latin noun cavitas (stem cavitatem), literally 'hollowness'. English took it in around the late 1500s, most directly through the French cavité, as a learned term for an enclosed empty space inside a body or an object. The same cavus root quietly underlies a family of English words including 'cave', 'concave', 'excavate', and even 'cage', all of which carry the idea of a hollowed-out space. The modern dental sense, a decayed hole in a tooth, is simply this older 'hollow' meaning applied to the small pit that decay opens up. For spelling, it helps to picture the single 'v' sitting between two short vowels, and to remember the tidy '-ity' ending shared by words like 'gravity' and 'activity'.

How the word is built

• cav- (from Latin cavus: hollow)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or thing)