Geography

How to spell geography

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce geography

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does geography mean?

1. nounThe study of the earth's physical features, climates, populations, and the relationships between them.

Geography in a sentence

• She teaches geography at the local secondary school.

• The exam covered both physical and human geography.

Where does geography come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Geography comes from the Greek geographia, which was assembled from ge meaning 'earth' and graphein meaning 'to write' or 'to describe', so the word literally means 'a writing about the earth' or 'earth-description'. The ancient Greek scholar Eratosthenes, who famously calculated the circumference of the planet, is credited with coining the term in the third century BC. The word travelled through Latin geographia and then into English during the 1500s, when Renaissance scholars were eagerly rediscovering classical learning and mapping a newly explored world. The same ge root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'geology' (study of the earth) and 'geometry' (originally 'earth-measuring'), while the graph element links it to 'photograph' and 'autograph'. For spellers, the trap is that soft, almost silent middle: the 'o' of geo joined to the 'gra' of graph hides an unstressed vowel that is easy to drop.

How the word is built

• geo- (earth)
• -graph (writing/describing)
• -y (noun suffix)