Closure

How to spell closure

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce closure

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does closure mean?

1. nounThe act of closing something, or the fact of a business, road, or facility being permanently or temporarily shut.
2. nounA feeling of resolution or finality that allows a person to move on from a difficult experience.

Closure in a sentence

• The factory closure left two hundred staff looking for new work.

• The apology finally gave her a sense of closure after years of resentment.

• Roadworks forced the closure of the main bridge for three weeks.

• Families of the victims said the verdict brought them some closure.

Where does closure come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Closure traces back to the Latin verb claudere, meaning 'to shut' or 'to close', whose past participle clausus gave rise to the noun clausura, 'a means of shutting' or 'an enclosed place'. That noun passed into Old French as closure before being adopted into English in the late 1300s, where it first described a fence, barrier, or enclosure that shut a space off. Over time the sense broadened from physical shutting to the abstract idea of bringing something to an end, such as a debate, a deal, or a chapter of life. In the twentieth century psychologists popularised the now familiar emotional sense of a feeling of resolution. The same claudere root sits inside relatives like 'enclose', 'conclude', and 'recluse', and it is the soft 's' standing in for that original Latin 's' that makes writers hesitate over the spelling.

How the word is built

• clos- (from Latin claudere: to shut)
• -ure (noun suffix forming the act or result)