Documentation

How to spell documentation

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce documentation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does documentation mean?

1. nounWritten or printed material that records, proves, or explains something.

Documentation in a sentence

• The customs officer asked for documentation proving the car's ownership.

• The software ships with detailed documentation for every command.

Where does documentation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb docere, meaning 'to teach' or 'to show', which also gave us 'doctor' (originally a learned teacher) and 'doctrine'. From docere came documentum, a lesson, a written proof, or an example that instructs. Medieval Latin shifted documentum towards the sense of an official written record, and English borrowed 'document' through Old French in the 1400s with that legal, evidential meaning. The longer form 'documentation' was assembled later, becoming common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to name both the act of supporting something with documents and the body of records itself. The hidden trap is the unstressed middle, doc-u-men-TAY-shun, where the 'u' and the first 'a' are easy schwa sounds that tempt writers to drop or swap a vowel.

How the word is built

• docu- (from Latin docere: to teach)
• -ment (result/means suffix)
• -ation (noun of action)