Disobedience

How to spell disobedience

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce disobedience

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disobedience mean?

1. nounRefusal or failure to obey rules, orders, or someone in authority.

Disobedience in a sentence

• The manager treated his repeated lateness as outright disobedience.

• The protest was an act of civil disobedience against the new tax.

Where does disobedience come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb oboedire, meaning 'to obey', which was built from ob- 'toward' and audire 'to hear' or 'to listen', so the literal idea was listening attentively toward someone in authority. From oboedire came the noun oboedientia, 'obedience', and English drew this in through Old French obedience in the medieval period. The negative form was made by attaching the prefix dis-, meaning 'not' or 'the opposite of', giving 'disobedience', the refusal to comply. The buried audire root is the same one that gives us 'audio' and 'audience', a useful reminder that obeying once meant hearkening to a voice. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the silent feel of the schwa and the -ience ending lead writers to fumble the vowels, even though the word is built tidily from dis + obedi + ence.

How the word is built

• dis- (not, opposite of)
• obedi- (from Latin oboedire: to obey, literally to listen toward)
• -ence (noun suffix)