Geology

How to spell geology

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce geology

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does geology mean?

1. nounThe science that studies the Earth's physical structure, rocks, and the processes that have shaped it over time.

Geology in a sentence

• She studied geology at university before joining the mining survey.

• The field trip taught the students how to read the geology of the canyon walls.

Where does geology come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word geology is a modern scientific compound built from two Greek elements: gē, meaning 'earth' or 'ground', and logia, meaning 'the study or account of something', from logos, 'word, reason, discourse'. It was assembled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as European scholars began to treat the structure of the planet as a systematic field of inquiry, and it settled into common use as a name for the science of rocks and the Earth's crust by the late 1700s. The same gē root quietly powers a whole family of related words, including geography (earth-writing), geometry (earth-measuring), and geothermal (earth-heat). The -logy ending is the familiar tag for a branch of knowledge, seen in biology, geology's close cousin, and many others. Because the joint between geo and logy hides an unstressed 'o', writers occasionally fumble the middle of the word, but the meaning of each half makes the spelling logical once it is seen.

How the word is built

• geo- (from Greek gē: earth)
• -logy (from logos: study, discourse)