Confederacy

How to spell confederacy

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce confederacy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does confederacy mean?

1. nounA union or league of states, groups, or people who join together for a common purpose.

Confederacy in a sentence

• The loose confederacy of trading towns agreed to share a single currency.

• Several small unions formed a confederacy to negotiate as one body.

Where does confederacy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun foedus, which meant a treaty, a league, or a formal pact between parties, and the related verb foederare, meaning 'to join by an agreement'. Medieval Latin built confoederatio for a binding alliance, and the term passed into English through Old French confederacie during the late 1300s, carrying the sense of states or people united by a sworn agreement. The same foedus root sits inside 'federal' and 'federation', which is a helpful memory hook, since they all share that central -feder- spelling rather than -fedder-. Over the centuries the word kept its core idea of a loose union for a common purpose, whether peaceful or hostile, and it later attached famously to the Confederate States of America in the 1860s. The spelling trap lives at the end: the soft unstressed -acy ending sounds like it could be spelled many ways, yet it follows the same pattern as 'democracy' and 'literacy'.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• feder- (from Latin foedus: league, treaty)
• -acy (noun suffix: state or condition)