Commemorate

How to spell commemorate

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce commemorate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does commemorate mean?

1. verbTo honour and keep alive the memory of a person or event, often through a ceremony, monument, or other formal act.

Commemorate in a sentence

• The town built a stone arch to commemorate the soldiers who died in the war.

• The office held a quiet lunch to commemorate thirty years since the company was founded.

Where does commemorate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin verb commemorare, meaning 'to call to mind' or 'to bring to remembrance'. It was built from the intensive prefix com-, here strengthening the sense, and memorare 'to remind' or 'to mention', which itself rests on memor, an adjective meaning 'mindful' or 'remembering'. That same memor root sits inside the everyday words 'memory', 'memorial' and 'remember', so commemorate is really a cousin of the act of remembering. English adopted the word in the late 1500s, and it quickly settled into its modern sense of honouring a person or event with a public act or ceremony. The doubled m in com- followed by the m of memor is exactly where adults slip, since the spoken word offers no clue that two separate m sounds are written so closely together.

How the word is built

• com- (intensive, fully)
• memor (mindful, remembering)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)