Diversification

How to spell diversification

15 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce diversification

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does diversification mean?

1. nounThe act of expanding into a wider range of products, investments, or activities to reduce reliance on any single one.

Diversification in a sentence

• The fund manager recommended diversification to protect the portfolio from a single market crash.

• The company's diversification into software helped it survive the decline in hardware sales.

Where does diversification come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb vertere, meaning 'to turn', combined with the prefix dis- or di- in the sense of 'apart' or 'in different directions', which gave Latin diversus, literally 'turned in different ways' and so 'varied' or 'different'. From that came the medieval Latin verb diversificare, 'to make different', which English absorbed through French as 'diversify'. The noun 'diversification' was then formed in English by adding the action ending -ation, and it gained real currency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as economists and investors described the spreading of risk across varied assets. The same vertere root spins through a whole family of English words, including 'reverse', 'convert' and 'version', all of which involve some kind of turning. Knowing that the core is 'vers', the turning part, helps explain the single s in the middle that writers sometimes want to double.

How the word is built

• di- (apart, in different directions)
• vers (from vertere: to turn)
• -ify (to make)
• -ation (noun of action)