Centurion

How to spell centurion

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce centurion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does centurion mean?

1. nounAn officer in the ancient Roman army who commanded a unit of roughly one hundred soldiers.

Centurion in a sentence

• The museum exhibit reconstructed the armour worn by a Roman centurion.

• Each centurion was responsible for the discipline of about a hundred men.

Where does centurion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin centurio, which named the officer who commanded a centuria, a company of soldiers in the Roman army. The root behind it is centum, the Latin word for 'hundred', so a centuria was originally a group of one hundred men, though in practice the unit often held around eighty. The same centum survives in everyday words such as 'cent', 'century', and 'percent', which is a useful reminder that the spelling begins with 'cent', not 'sent'. English took the word up in the medieval period, partly through Old French and partly straight from Latin in church texts, because centurions appear in the Gospels. The classic spelling trap is the unstressed middle: it is 'centur-ion', not 'centeri-on' or 'centurian'.

How the word is built

• centur- (from Latin centuria: a unit of one hundred)
• -ion (agent/noun suffix denoting the officer in charge)