Fitness

How to spell fitness

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fitness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fitness mean?

1. nounThe condition of being physically healthy and strong, usually through exercise.
2. nounThe quality of being suitable or well adapted for a particular purpose or role.

Fitness in a sentence

• The gym offers a free fitness assessment to new members.

• The panel questioned his fitness for such a senior position.

• Regular cycling improved her overall fitness within months.

• The report assessed the building's fitness for residential use.

Where does fitness come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the native English adjective 'fit', whose earliest recorded sense in Middle English was 'suitable' or 'well adapted to a purpose', and the productive Old English suffix '-ness', which turns an adjective into a noun for the corresponding state or quality. The origin of 'fit' itself is somewhat obscure, but it is broadly Germanic in character and appears in English from around the fourteenth century. For most of its life 'fitness' simply meant 'suitability' or 'aptness', as in being fit for a task, and that legal and logical sense of being well suited still survives in phrases like 'fitness for purpose'. Only in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries did the now dominant meaning of bodily health and physical conditioning rise to the front. Because the suffix attaches cleanly to the whole word 'fit', the spelling keeps both consonants together, giving the easily remembered pattern fit + ness.

How the word is built

• fit (suitable, in good condition)
• -ness (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or quality)