Cultivate

How to spell cultivate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cultivate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cultivate mean?

1. verbTo prepare and use land for growing crops, or to grow and tend a plant.
2. verbTo deliberately develop or encourage a quality, skill, or relationship through effort over time.

Cultivate in a sentence

• The family has worked hard to cultivate the steep terraced fields.

• Good managers cultivate trust among their team members.

• She plans to cultivate tomatoes and herbs in the back garden this summer.

• He tried to cultivate useful contacts at every conference he attended.

Where does cultivate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Medieval Latin cultivare, meaning 'to till' or 'to prepare ground for crops', which was built on the Latin cultus, the past participle of colere, a verb that literally meant 'to tend, to care for, or to till the soil'. The same colere root branched out remarkably widely in English: it gave us 'culture', 'agriculture', 'colony', and even 'cult', all sharing the idea of tending or honouring something. English borrowed 'cultivate' in the early 1600s, by way of French cultiver, first in the farming sense of working the land. From there it quickly grew a figurative branch, so that people began to speak of cultivating friendships, talents, and tastes, as if these too were gardens needing patient care. The spelling keeps the soft -tiv- in the middle that points straight back to that Latin cultivus origin.

How the word is built

• cult- (from colere: to till, tend, care for)
• -iv- (linking)
• -ate (verb suffix)