Context

How to spell context

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce context

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does context mean?

1. nounThe circumstances or background that surround an event, statement, or idea and help explain its meaning.

Context in a sentence

• The quote was unfair because it was taken out of context.

• The report explains the financial context behind the decision.

Where does context come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word context comes from the Latin contextus, meaning 'a joining together' or 'a connected structure', which was the past participle of contexere, 'to weave together'. That verb combines con-, meaning 'together', with texere, 'to weave', the same root that gives us 'textile' and 'texture', words still tied to the idea of threads woven into a whole. When context first entered English in the early 1400s it kept this literal sense of a piece of writing whose words are woven into a connected passage. From there the meaning broadened to cover the surrounding words that fix the sense of a particular phrase, and later still to the wider circumstances that give any event or statement its meaning. The hidden 'weaving' idea is a useful memory aid: context is everything woven around something, and the spelling keeps the plain -text ending with no awkward traps.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• text (from Latin textus: woven, a thing put together)