Culture

How to spell culture

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce culture

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does culture mean?

1. nounThe shared customs, arts, beliefs, and way of life of a particular group or society.
2. nounA growth of bacteria, cells, or other microorganisms cultivated in a controlled medium.

Culture in a sentence

• Travelling abroad exposed her to a completely different culture.

• The lab grew a culture of bacteria from the swab to identify the infection.

• The company tried to build a culture of openness and trust among staff.

• The yoghurt is made using a live bacterial culture.

Where does culture come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Culture comes from the Latin cultura, meaning 'a tending, a tilling, or a growing', which was built on the verb colere, meaning 'to till the soil, to cultivate, or to tend'. For centuries the word kept its agricultural sense, referring to the working of land and the raising of crops, and that older meaning still survives in expressions like 'agriculture' and 'horticulture', which share the same root. English borrowed culture through French in the fifteenth century, at first for the cultivation of soil. From the 1500s onward the meaning was extended figuratively to the 'cultivation' of the mind and manners, and by the nineteenth century it had grown into our modern sense of the shared customs, arts, and beliefs of a society. The same colere root also lies behind 'cult' and 'colony', a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the cult- stem before the -ure ending.

How the word is built

• cult- (from colere: to till, cultivate, tend)
• -ure (noun suffix denoting action or result)