Fertilization

How to spell fertilization

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce fertilization

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fertilization mean?

1. nounThe fusion of a sperm or pollen cell with an egg cell to begin the development of a new organism.
2. nounThe process of enriching soil with nutrients so that plants grow better.

Fertilization in a sentence

• The clinic explained how fertilization occurs in the laboratory dish.

• Regular fertilization of the lawn keeps the grass thick and green.

• In many plants, insects carry the pollen needed for fertilization.

• The farmer scheduled fertilization of the fields before the spring planting.

Where does fertilization come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin adjective fertilis, meaning 'fruitful' or 'capable of producing', which was built on ferre, the verb 'to bear or carry', the same root that gives us 'fertile' and 'fertility'. English took 'fertile' from French in the 1400s, and the verb 'fertilize' was coined later, around the 1640s, to mean 'to make fruitful'. The abstract noun 'fertilization' followed, adding the Latin-derived ending -ation that marks a process or action. Its meaning split along two practical lines: the agricultural sense of enriching soil, and the biological sense of an egg being made fruitful by a sperm or pollen, a usage that grew with nineteenth-century science. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the schwa vowels of 'fer-ti-li' tempt writers to drop or swap letters, and the -ize ending hides inside the longer word.

How the word is built

• fertil- (from Latin fertilis: fruitful, productive)
• -ize (verb-forming, to make)
• -ation (noun of process)

British and American spelling

Fertilization is the American spelling. British English spells it fertilisation.