Disarmament

How to spell disarmament

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce disarmament

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disarmament mean?

1. nounThe reduction or removal of a country's military weapons and armed forces.

Disarmament in a sentence

• The treaty committed both nations to gradual nuclear disarmament.

• Diplomats spent years negotiating the terms of disarmament before any progress was made.

Where does disarmament come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun arma, meaning 'weapons' or 'tools of war', the same root that gives us 'army', 'armour', and 'arsenal'. From arma came the Latin verb armare, 'to equip with weapons', which passed into Old French as armer and then into English as 'arm'. The prefix dis- carries the sense of reversal or undoing, so to 'disarm' was to strip away weapons, a verb English took from Old French desarmer in the late 1300s. The abstract noun 'disarmament' was then formed by adding the -ment suffix, which turns an action into a state or process, and it became common in the 1800s and especially the 1900s in the language of treaties and diplomacy. The spelling trap lies in that quiet middle: writers must remember the linking vowel and the full -ament ending, since the unstressed syllables blur in speech.

How the word is built

• dis- (reversal, undoing)
• arm (to equip with weapons)
• -a- (linking vowel)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)