Certainty

How to spell certainty

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce certainty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does certainty mean?

1. nounFirm conviction that something is true, or the quality of being reliably guaranteed.

Certainty in a sentence

• The lawyer could not state with certainty when the verdict would arrive.

• There is no certainty that the flight will depart on schedule.

Where does certainty come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the Old French certaineté, meaning the quality of being sure or settled, which was built on the adjective certain. That adjective traces back to the Latin certus, meaning 'settled', 'fixed', or 'decided', the past participle of cernere, a verb that originally meant 'to sift', 'to separate', and then 'to decide' or 'to determine'. The underlying idea is appealing: to be certain is to have sifted the matter until what is true has been separated out from what is doubtful. English adopted the word during the 1300s, retaining the soft 'c' sound that the spelling 'cer-' signals. The same cernere root surfaces in relatives such as 'discern', 'concern', and 'secret', all of which carry a faint trace of that original sense of sifting and setting apart.

How the word is built

• certain (sure, settled)
• -ty (noun suffix forming a state or quality)