Financial

How to spell financial

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce financial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does financial mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to money, banking, or the management of large sums.

Financial in a sentence

• The company released its financial results for the quarter.

• Careful budgeting gave the family real financial security.

Where does financial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb finare, meaning 'to settle a debt' or 'to pay', which itself grew from finis, the Latin noun for 'end' or 'boundary'. The link is logical: a debt was something brought to an end by payment, so settling accounts and reaching a conclusion were the same idea. The noun 'finance' came into English through Old French finance, originally meaning a payment, a ransom, or the settling of a sum, before broadening to mean the management of money generally. The adjective 'financial' was formed in English in the seventeenth century by attaching the suffix -ial, which is why the word ends in -cial rather than -tial; that soft 'c' followed by -ial is the spelling trap, since the ear hears a 'sh' sound that could be written several ways. The same finis root surfaces in everyday relatives such as 'finish', 'final', and 'define', all of which share the underlying sense of an ending or a limit.

How the word is built

• financ- (from finance: management of money)
• -ial (adjective suffix)