Fertility

How to spell fertility

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce fertility

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fertility mean?

1. nounThe natural capability to produce offspring, or the richness of soil for growing crops.

Fertility in a sentence

• The clinic specialises in treatments that boost human fertility.

• Farmers add compost to restore the fertility of exhausted soil.

Where does fertility come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin fertilitas, meaning 'fruitfulness' or 'productiveness', which was built on the adjective fertilis, 'capable of bearing or producing'. That adjective in turn traces back to the verb ferre, meaning 'to bear' or 'to carry', the same root that underlies English words such as 'transfer' and 'refer'. The literal idea was of land or living things that could carry and bring forth abundant offspring or crops. English adopted the word in the early 1500s, by way of Old French fertilite, first describing rich, productive soil and later extending to the reproductive capacity of people and animals. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the stress falls on the second syllable (fer-TIL-i-ty), so the closing '-ility' can easily be mis-vowelled when written from memory.

How the word is built

• fertil- (from Latin fertilis: fruitful, productive)
• -ity (noun suffix forming a quality or state)