Facility

How to spell facility

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce facility

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does facility mean?

1. nounA place, building, or piece of equipment provided for a particular purpose.
2. nounA natural ability to do something easily and well.

Facility in a sentence

• The new sports facility includes a pool and a gym.

• She has a remarkable facility for learning new languages.

• The company built a research facility near the airport.

• His facility with numbers made the accounting job feel effortless.

Where does facility come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin facilitas, meaning 'easiness' or 'readiness', which was built on the adjective facilis, 'easy to do', and ultimately on the verb facere, 'to do or make'. When English borrowed it through French in the early sixteenth century, the first meaning was abstract: an ease or fluency in doing something, as when someone has a natural facility for languages. Over time the plural and singular drifted toward the concrete sense of something that makes a task easier, and eventually toward the buildings and equipment provided for a purpose, the meaning most common today. The same facere root quietly powers a huge family of English words, including 'factory', 'manufacture', 'faculty' and 'facile', so the -fac- core is the spelling anchor worth remembering. The trap for adults is the unstressed middle vowel and the single l: it is fa-CIL-i-ty, not 'facillity'.

How the word is built

• facil- (from Latin facilis: easy, from facere: to do/make)
• -ity (noun suffix forming a quality or thing)