Exclusion

How to spell exclusion

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce exclusion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exclusion mean?

1. nounThe act of leaving something or someone out, or the state of being shut out or barred.

Exclusion in a sentence

• The policy guarantees medical cover with no exclusion for pre-existing conditions.

• His repeated exclusion from team meetings made him feel undervalued at work.

Where does exclusion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Exclusion comes from the Latin exclusio, a noun built from the verb excludere, which combined ex- meaning 'out' with claudere meaning 'to shut or close'. The literal sense was therefore 'a shutting out', the act of keeping something or someone outside. English took the word in during the late 1400s, largely through legal and scholarly Latin, where it described the formal barring of a person or claim. The same claudere root, with its 'clud/clus' spelling shift, also gives us 'include', 'conclude', 'seclude' and 'recluse', which is a useful family to remember when you reach the tricky middle: it is spelled with a single s in -clus-, not a double s, because the sound is the soft 'zh' of the Latin -sio ending. Keeping the 'clud becomes clus' pattern in mind helps fix why the ending is -sion rather than -tion.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• clud-/clus- (from claudere: to shut, close)
• -ion (noun-forming suffix)