Emotional

How to spell emotional

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce emotional

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does emotional mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to a person's feelings, or showing strong feelings.

Emotional in a sentence

• The farewell speech left many colleagues feeling deeply emotional.

• She found the divorce far more emotional than she had expected.

Where does emotional come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word emotional grows out of the Latin verb movere, meaning 'to move', through the form emovere, which combined the prefix e- (a variant of ex-, 'out') with movere to give the sense of 'to move out' or 'to stir up'. From this came the French émotion, which originally described a physical disturbance or commotion, such as a public uprising, rather than a feeling. English borrowed 'emotion' in the seventeenth century, and the meaning gradually settled on the inner stirrings of the mind: feelings such as joy, grief, and anger. The adjective 'emotional' was then formed by adding the familiar -al suffix in the nineteenth century. The root movere is hugely productive in English, lying behind 'motion', 'motive', and 'remove', which can help you remember the single m and the t in the middle of emotional.

How the word is built

• e- (variant of ex-, out)
• mot (from movere: to move)
• -ion (state)
• -al (adjective suffix)