Environmental

How to spell environmental

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce environmental

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does environmental mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the natural world or to the surroundings in which people, animals, and plants live.

Environmental in a sentence

• The factory was fined for breaching environmental regulations.

• The charity funds environmental projects that clean up rivers and forests.

Where does environmental come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back through the noun 'environment' to the Old French verb 'environner', meaning 'to surround' or 'to encircle'. That verb was built on 'environ', an adverb meaning 'round about', which itself combined 'en' (in) with 'viron' (a circle or circuit), a relative of 'virer' meaning 'to turn'. English adopted 'environ' as a verb in the late 1300s with the sense of surrounding something, and by the early 1600s the noun 'environment' described one's surroundings in general. The familiar ecological meaning, the natural world considered as something to protect, took hold mainly in the twentieth century, and the adjective 'environmental' grew alongside it. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the 'n' in 'enviro-N-ment' is easy to drop because most speakers do not pronounce it clearly, so picturing the buried 'viron' (the turning circle) helps fix that hidden letter.

How the word is built

• en- (in, make)
• viron (from Old French environ: around, round about)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)
• -al (adjective-forming suffix)