Disagreement

How to spell disagreement

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce disagreement

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disagreement mean?

1. nounA difference of opinion, or a situation in which people do not agree.

Disagreement in a sentence

• The meeting ended in a sharp disagreement over the budget.

• There was a genuine disagreement between the two managers about hiring.

Where does disagreement come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is built from the verb 'agree', which English took from the Old French 'agréer', meaning 'to please' or 'to consent', itself formed from the phrase 'a gré', literally 'to one's liking' or 'to one's pleasure'. The 'gré' part traces back to the Latin 'gratum', the neuter form of 'gratus', meaning 'pleasing' or 'welcome', the same root that gives us 'grateful' and 'gratitude'. By the time English added the negative prefix 'dis-', meaning 'not' or 'the opposite of', and the noun-forming suffix '-ment', the sense had shifted from pleasing someone to being in accord with them, so 'disagreement' came to mean a failure of that accord. The word appears in English from the 1400s onward as the abstract noun for a quarrel or difference of opinion. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the silent run of vowels in 'agree' (a single 'a' then a doubled 'e') sits between the prefix and the suffix, and writers sometimes drop one of the letters they cannot hear.

How the word is built

• dis- (not, opposite of)
• agree (from Old French agréer: to please, to consent)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)