Facilities

How to spell facilities

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce facilities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does facilities mean?

1. nounThe buildings, equipment, or services provided for a particular purpose or activity.

Facilities in a sentence

• The new gym has excellent facilities for members.

• The conference centre offers parking and catering facilities.

Where does facilities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin facilitas, meaning 'easiness' or 'readiness', which was built on the adjective facilis, 'easy to do', itself rooted in the verb facere, 'to do or make'. The early sense in English, borrowed through French in the sixteenth century, was abstract: a facility was the quality of doing something without difficulty, the ease or fluency with which a task could be performed. Over time the meaning broadened from this inner ease to the outward things that make tasks easy, so by the nineteenth century 'facilities' had come to mean the buildings, equipment, and services provided to enable an activity. The same facere root sits inside a whole family of English words, including 'factory', 'manufacture', and 'difficult', the last of which literally means 'not easy'. The tricky stretch for spellers is the unstressed middle, where the soft c followed by the schwa-heavy '-ili-' invites dropped or doubled letters; remembering the link to 'facile' and 'easy' helps keep the single c and the -il- in place.

How the word is built

• facil- (from Latin facilis: easy)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)
• -es (plural)