Contemporaries

How to spell contemporaries

14 letters · 5 syllables

10 of the 62 people asked to spell contemporaries in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce contemporaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does contemporaries mean?

1. nounPeople who live, work, or exist during the same period of time as one another.

Contemporaries in a sentence

• The painter earned far more recognition than most of her contemporaries.

• Unlike many of his contemporaries, he embraced the new technology early.

Where does contemporaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin contemporarius, formed from con- meaning 'together' and tempus meaning 'time', so its literal sense is 'belonging to the same time'. The Latin tempus also lies behind everyday words such as 'temporary', 'tempo', and 'temporal', all of which carry the idea of time. English adopted the form in the seventeenth century, first as an adjective describing things existing in the same period and then as a noun for the people who live or work alongside one another in that period. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle: the 'por' is barely sounded, and writers often forget the second 'o' or stumble over the -ary ending becoming -aries in the plural. Holding the root tempus, 'time', firmly in mind keeps that quiet vowel in place.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• tempor- (from Latin tempus: time)
• -ary (relating to)
• -es (plural)

People who misspell contemporaries also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got contemporaries wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• connoisseur 100% of them got it wrong