Fertilizer

How to spell fertilizer

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce fertilizer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fertilizer mean?

1. nounA natural or chemical substance added to soil or land to make plants grow more productively.

Fertilizer in a sentence

• The gardener spread fertilizer across the vegetable beds before the spring planting.

• Farmers measured the cost of fertilizer carefully against the season's expected yield.

Where does fertilizer come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin adjective fertilis, meaning 'fruitful' or 'capable of producing', which itself grew from the verb ferre, 'to bear' or 'to carry'. That same ferre lies behind a surprising family of English words, including 'transfer', 'refer', and 'fertile' itself, all built on the idea of carrying or bringing forth. English took 'fertile' from Old French in the fifteenth century, and the verb 'fertilize', meaning to make land fruitful, followed later. The agent noun 'fertilizer', for a substance added to soil to make it productive, became common in the nineteenth century alongside advances in industrial agriculture. The spelling keeps the single 'l' of fertile and adds the -ize/-er ending, so the trap for writers is the unstressed middle syllable, often misheard as a vague 'uh' sound.

How the word is built

• fertil- (from Latin fertilis: fruitful, productive)
• -ize (verb-forming suffix)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: the thing that does the action)

British and American spelling

Fertilizer is the American spelling. British English spells it fertiliser.