Contingent

How to spell contingent

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce contingent

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does contingent mean?

1. adjectiveDependent on or conditioned by something else that may or may not happen.
2. nounA group of people representing a larger organisation, region, or military force.

Contingent in a sentence

• adjective

  The bonus is contingent on the team hitting its annual sales target.

• noun

  A large contingent of nurses travelled to the conference from the northern hospitals.

• adjective

  Their move to the new house was contingent on selling the old one first.

• noun

  The peacekeeping force included a small contingent of engineers.

Where does contingent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb contingere, meaning 'to touch closely', 'to be in contact with', and by extension 'to happen' or 'to befall'. It was built from con-, here an intensifying form of cum meaning 'together', joined to tangere, the verb 'to touch', which also gives us 'tangent', 'tactile', and 'contact'. The present participle contingens described things that 'touch upon' or 'come to pass', which is how the sense of chance and dependency developed: an event that merely touches the edge of necessity, one that might or might not occur. English adopted it in the late 1300s, first carrying the flavour of something happening by chance, and later the legal and logical sense of something conditional on another fact. The military and group sense, a body of troops 'falling to' a larger force as its share, grew from the same idea of a portion that comes to one. The tricky spelling sits in the unstressed middle and end: the soft -ting- and the -ent ending (not -ant) both echo that buried Latin tangere root.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• ting- (from Latin tangere: to touch)
• -ent (adjective/noun suffix)