Expectancy

How to spell expectancy

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce expectancy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does expectancy mean?

1. nounThe state or feeling of anticipating that something will happen, or the predicted amount of something.

Expectancy in a sentence

• The crowd waited with quiet expectancy for the results to be announced.

• Average life expectancy in the region has risen steadily over the past decade.

Where does expectancy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb exspectare, meaning 'to look out for' or 'to await', which combined ex-, here intensifying 'out' or 'thoroughly', with spectare, 'to look at' or 'to watch'. The same spectare root sits inside a whole family of familiar English words, including spectator, inspect, and spectacle, all of them involving the idea of looking. English picked up 'expect' in the sixteenth century, and the noun 'expectancy' followed, built with the Latin-derived suffix -ancy that turns a verb into the name of a state or condition. Over time the word settled into two related uses: the general feeling of awaiting something, and the measured statistical sense found in phrases such as 'life expectancy', where it means the amount of something one can reasonably anticipate. The spelling trap lies in the quiet middle, the -ct- followed by the unstressed -ancy ending, which writers sometimes render as -ency by mistake.

How the word is built

• ex- (out, thoroughly)
• spect (to look, watch)
• -ancy (noun suffix forming a state or quality)