Concentration

How to spell concentration

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce concentration

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does concentration mean?

1. nounThe act of directing all one's mental attention onto a single task or subject.
2. nounThe amount of a substance present within a given volume or area.

Concentration in a sentence

• The constant noise from the street broke her concentration during the exam.

• The lab measured a high concentration of salt in the water sample.

• Deep concentration is required to balance the quarterly accounts.

• A dangerous concentration of carbon monoxide was detected in the basement.

Where does concentration come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin centrum, meaning 'the fixed point of a circle' or 'centre', which Latin itself had borrowed from the Greek kentron, originally a sharp point or the spike of a compass used to draw circles. From centrum scholars built the verb concentrare, joining the prefix con- 'together' with the idea of a centre, so the literal sense was 'to bring toward a common centre'. French adopted this as concentrer, and English took 'concentrate' in the seventeenth century, with the noun 'concentration' following soon after. The meaning then branched naturally: gathering things to one point gave both the mental sense of focused attention and the chemical sense of how much of a substance is packed into a solution. The spelling trap lives in that buried centr root and the unstressed middle, since writers often forget it is centre at heart and may drift toward an extra letter.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• centr (centre/point)
• -ate (verb)
• -ion (noun of action/state)