Dividend

How to spell dividend

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dividend

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dividend mean?

1. nounA share of a company's profits paid out to its shareholders.
2. nounThe number that is to be divided by another in a division calculation.
3. nounA useful return or advantage that results from an effort or investment.

Dividend in a sentence

• The company paid a generous dividend to its shareholders this year.

• In the sum, the dividend is the number written before the division sign.

• Years of careful saving finally paid a real dividend for the family.

• She reinvested every dividend rather than spending the income.

• The teacher asked the class to identify the dividend and the divisor.

• The extra training delivered a clear dividend in safer working practices.

Where does dividend come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin dividendum, meaning 'a thing to be divided', which is the gerundive form of the verb dividere, 'to divide' or 'to force apart'. That verb was built from the prefix di- (a reduced form of dis-, meaning 'apart') joined to a root tied to separating and parting things. English took the word up in the fifteenth century, at first simply for any amount that was to be shared out. By the seventeenth century it had settled into its now familiar financial sense: the portion of a company's profits handed back to each shareholder. The same dividere also gives us 'divide', 'division' and 'individual' (literally something 'not divisible'), and the spelling trap lies in that quiet -end ending, which is the old Latin 'to be done' suffix rather than the everyday English word 'end'.

How the word is built

• di- (apart)
• vid (from videre/dividere: to divide)
• -end (gerundive suffix: 'that which is to be')