Generational

How to spell generational

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce generational

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does generational mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to a particular generation, or to the differences and relationships between generations.

Generational in a sentence

• The family business has been passed down through generational ownership for a century.

• The survey highlighted clear generational differences in how people save for retirement.

Where does generational come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This adjective traces back to the Latin verb generare, meaning 'to beget' or 'to bring forth', which itself grew from the noun genus, meaning 'race, kind, stock, or birth'. From generare came the Latin noun generatio, describing the act of producing offspring and, by extension, a single stage in the line of descent. English took 'generation' from Old French during the 1300s, and the adjective 'generational' was assembled much later, in the nineteenth century, by adding the familiar adjective ending -al. The same genus root quietly underlies a large family of English words, including 'genus', 'gene', 'genuine', and 'general', so the opening 'gener-' is the steady, reliable part of the spelling. The trickier stretch is the unstressed middle, where the '-ation-' syllables blur in speech and tempt writers to drop or swap a vowel.

How the word is built

• gener- (from Latin genus: race, kind, birth)
• -ation (process or result)
• -al (adjective suffix)