Familiar

How to spell familiar

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce familiar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does familiar mean?

1. adjectiveWell known from long or close acquaintance; easily recognised.

Familiar in a sentence

• The route home was so familiar that she drove it without thinking.

• His voice sounded oddly familiar on the recording.

Where does familiar come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin familiaris, meaning 'belonging to a household' or 'on intimate terms', which was built on familia, the word for a household and all its members, including the servants. That noun in turn traces back to famulus, meaning 'servant' or 'domestic'. English took the word in during the 1300s through Old French familier, at first to describe someone treated as part of the household, hence close and intimate, and only later widening to the modern sense of 'well known' or 'easily recognised'. The same familia root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'family' and 'familiarity', which is a useful memory hook: keep the 'famil' of family, then add the ending '-iar', not the '-er' that the pronunciation seems to suggest. That mismatch between the spoken 'lee-er' ending and the written 'liar' is exactly where the spelling trips people up.

How the word is built

• famil- (from Latin familia: household)
• -iar (adjective suffix, from Latin -iaris: belonging to)