Fraction

How to spell fraction

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fraction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fraction mean?

1. nounA small part, amount, or proportion of something larger.
2. nounA numerical quantity expressing one or more parts of a whole, written as one number over another.

Fraction in a sentence

• The repair cost only a fraction of what we had feared.

• The pupils learned to add one fraction to another using a common denominator.

• A tiny fraction of the audience stayed until the end.

• Converting a decimal into a fraction confused several students.

Where does fraction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin fractio, meaning 'a breaking', which was formed from the verb frangere, 'to break', and its past participle stem fractus. English picked it up through Old French in the late 1300s, when it first appeared in mathematical and theological writing to describe a piece broken off from a whole. The earliest English uses were quite literal, including the 'breaking' of bread in church ritual, before the arithmetical sense of a numerical part settled into place. The same fractus root still breaks through in everyday relatives such as 'fracture', 'fragment', and 'fragile', all of which carry the idea of something snapped or shattered. Remembering that fract means 'broken' helps fix the spelling, since the t belongs to the Latin stem and is never softened to a 'sh' spelling despite how the word sounds.

How the word is built

• fract- (from Latin frangere/fractus: to break)
• -ion (noun-forming suffix)