Competitiveness

How to spell competitiveness

15 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce competitiveness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does competitiveness mean?

1. nounThe ability or quality of being as good as or better than rivals, especially in business, sport, or pricing.

Competitiveness in a sentence

• The new tax breaks were designed to boost the country's competitiveness in export markets.

• Keeping wages low is not a sustainable route to long-term competitiveness.

Where does competitiveness come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb competere, which originally meant 'to come together' or 'to strive in common', formed from com- 'together' and petere 'to seek, aim at, or pursue'. Over time the sense shifted from people coming together toward a shared point to people seeking the same thing in rivalry, which is how the modern idea of competition emerged. English took 'compete' from this Latin root in the early 1600s, and the adjective 'competitive' followed, describing a person or thing inclined to compete. The abstract noun 'competitiveness' was then built by stacking the native English suffix -ness onto 'competitive', a pattern that lets us turn almost any adjective into a quality. The same petere root quietly lives inside 'appetite', 'petition', and 'repeat', so the spelling trap here is really the long unstressed middle (com-PET-i-tive-ness) where the schwa vowels and the single t before -itive are easy to fumble.

How the word is built

• com- (together)
• pet (from petere: to seek, aim at)
• -itive (adjective)
• -ness (noun-forming suffix)