Genealogy

How to spell genealogy

9 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce genealogy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does genealogy mean?

1. nounThe study or record of a family's line of descent through successive generations.

Genealogy in a sentence

• She spent the weekend researching her family genealogy in the parish records.

• The museum offers a workshop on how to build a reliable genealogy from census data.

Where does genealogy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the Greek genealogia, which combined genea, meaning 'race', 'family', or 'generation', with logos, meaning 'account' or 'study'; together it meant the tracing of a family's descent. The genea element belongs to a large and ancient family of words built on the root gen-, meaning 'to give birth' or 'to come into being', which also underlies 'gene', 'generate', 'genesis', and 'genuine'. The term passed from Greek into Latin as genealogia and then into Old French as genealogie before English adopted it in the 1300s. It is worth noticing the spelling trap: the ending is genea + logy, not 'geno' or 'gene' plus 'ology', so there is an 'ea' in the middle and no 'o' before the 'l'. Many fluent writers slip and produce 'geneology' precisely because so many other words use the familiar -ology pattern, but here the 'a' of genea survives.

How the word is built

• genea- (from Greek genea: race, descent, generation)
• -logy (from logos: study, account)