Curiosity

How to spell curiosity

9 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce curiosity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does curiosity mean?

1. nounA strong desire to learn or know something.
2. nounA strange, rare, or interesting object, especially a collectable one.

Curiosity in a sentence

• Her curiosity about the old house led her to research its history.

• The antique dealer treated the carved ivory as a prized curiosity.

• The documentary was made to satisfy public curiosity about deep-sea life.

• Among the shelves of dusty trinkets sat one genuine curiosity worth a fortune.

Where does curiosity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin curiositas, a noun meaning 'inquisitiveness' or 'careful attention', which was built on the adjective curiosus, 'eager to know' or 'taking pains over something'. That adjective in turn came from cura, meaning 'care' or 'concern', the same root that gives us 'cure' and 'curate'. English took the word in the late 1300s through Old French curiosete, at first carrying the sense of careful or fastidious attention before settling into the modern meaning of an eager desire to learn. By the 1600s it had also gained the sense of a strange or interesting object, as in a 'curiosity shop'. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unstressed 'i' in curi-OS-ity is easy to lose, and the ending is -osity rather than the -ousity that the adjective 'curious' might tempt a writer to use.

How the word is built

• curios- (from Latin curiosus: careful, inquisitive)
• -ity (noun suffix meaning state or quality)