Exclusivity

How to spell exclusivity

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce exclusivity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exclusivity mean?

1. nounThe quality of being restricted, select, or available to only a limited group.

Exclusivity in a sentence

• The club guards its exclusivity by capping membership at fifty people.

• The brand trades on exclusivity, releasing only a few hundred watches each year.

Where does exclusivity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb excludere, meaning 'to shut out', formed from ex- 'out' and claudere 'to close or shut'. The same claudere root, which described the act of closing a door, also gave English a whole family of related words including 'close', 'enclose', 'conclude', and 'seclude'. The past participle exclusus produced 'exclusive', which entered English in the late 1400s and originally meant simply 'shutting out' or 'leaving out'. By the eighteenth century 'exclusive' had taken on its social sense of restricting access to a select few, and the abstract noun 'exclusivity' was built from it with the suffix -ity to name that quality of being restricted or select. Remembering that the middle is the 'clus' of 'include' and 'conclude', not a 'clos', helps fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• clus (from Latin claudere, to shut or close)
• -iv(e) (adjective)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)