Condensation

How to spell condensation

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce condensation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does condensation mean?

1. nounThe water that forms as droplets when warm, moist air cools against a colder surface, or the process by which vapour turns into liquid.
2. nounThe physical change of a substance from its gaseous state into its liquid state.

Condensation in a sentence

• Every winter morning there is condensation running down the inside of the bedroom window.

• The diagram showed evaporation at the surface and condensation in the cooler upper layer.

• The bathroom extractor fan reduces condensation and stops mould from forming on the ceiling.

• Steam from the kettle undergoes condensation as soon as it meets the cool tiles.

Where does condensation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb condensare, meaning 'to make thick' or 'to press closely together', which was built from the prefix con- ('together') and densus, an adjective meaning 'thick, crowded, or dense'. Latin formed the noun condensatio for the act of thickening, and English took the word in through French and directly from Latin in the early 1600s. At first it simply meant any compacting or thickening; the now-familiar scientific sense, water vapour turning back into liquid droplets, grew out of that idea as the physics of gases and liquids was studied in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The same densus root sits inside the everyday words 'dense' and 'density', which is a useful reminder that the middle of the word is spelled with an s, not a z. Keeping that single s and the -sation ending in mind is the main spelling trap.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• dens (from Latin densus: thick, crowded)
• -ation (noun of process/result)