Chronological

How to spell chronological

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce chronological

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chronological mean?

1. adjectiveArranged in the order in which events happened over time.

Chronological in a sentence

• The museum displays the photographs in chronological order, starting with the earliest.

• She filed the invoices in chronological sequence so the oldest sat at the front.

Where does chronological come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reaches back to the Greek khronos, which simply meant 'time' and which still surfaces in relatives such as 'chronic', 'chronicle', and 'synchronise'. To that root was joined logos, a remarkably versatile Greek word meaning 'word', 'account', or 'reasoning', the same element that ends countless terms like 'biological' and 'logical'. The combined idea is therefore an 'account ordered by time', and the modern adjective took shape in English in the seventeenth century, often via the Latinised scholarly form chronologicus. It came into use among historians and astronomers who needed to fix events to their proper dates, and from there spread into everyday writing about sequence and order. The spelling trap lives in the opening 'chr', a Greek cluster that sounds like a plain 'k', and in the unstressed middle vowels that quietly blur in speech.

How the word is built

• chrono- (from Greek khronos: time)
• log- (from logos: word, account, reasoning)
• -ical (adjective suffix)