Crisis

How to spell crisis

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crisis

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crisis mean?

1. nounA time of intense difficulty, danger, or decisive change when an important decision must be made.

Crisis in a sentence

• The company called an emergency meeting to manage the financial crisis.

• The housing crisis has pushed rents well beyond what many families can afford.

Where does crisis come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek krisis, meaning 'a decision, judgement, or turning point', built on the verb krinein, 'to separate, decide, or judge'. In ancient Greek medicine, especially the writings associated with Hippocrates, the krisis was the precise moment in an illness when the patient would take a decisive turn toward recovery or death. Latin borrowed the term as crisis, keeping the medical sense, and it passed into English in the early 1400s still meaning the turning point of a disease. From the 1600s onward the meaning broadened to cover any decisive or dangerous moment in affairs more generally. The same krinein root underlies words such as 'critic' and 'criterion', and the spelling trap lives in the unstressed second syllable, where the schwa makes the '-is' ending easy to misjudge, and in the irregular plural 'crises'.

How the word is built

• cris- (from Greek krisis: a decision, turning point)
• -is (Greek noun ending)