Commandant

How to spell commandant

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce commandant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does commandant mean?

1. nounAn officer in charge of a military establishment, such as a fort, camp, academy, or prison.

Commandant in a sentence

• The commandant ordered an inspection of every barracks before dawn.

• New recruits reported directly to the commandant of the training academy.

Where does commandant come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the seventeenth century directly from French, where commandant is the present participle of the verb commander, meaning 'to command'. The French verb descends from the Late Latin commandare, a strengthened form of mandare, which literally meant 'to give into someone's hand' or 'to entrust', built from manus 'hand' and dare 'to give'. So at its root a commandant is quite literally 'the one commanding', the person into whose hand authority has been placed. The same Latin manus surfaces in everyday relatives such as 'manual' and 'manage', while mandare gives us 'mandate' and 'command' itself. The spelling trap is the French ending: it keeps the -ant suffix and the single d, so writers must resist the pull toward an English -ent or a doubled consonant.

How the word is built

• command (from Latin commandare: to entrust, command)
• -ant (agent suffix: one who does)

People who misspell commandant also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got commandant wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

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