Governance

How to spell governance

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce governance

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does governance mean?

1. nounThe systems, processes and rules by which an organisation or country is directed and held accountable.

Governance in a sentence

• The board reviewed the company's corporate governance every quarter.

• Weak governance allowed the budget overruns to go unchecked for years.

Where does governance come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Governance traces back to the Latin verb gubernare, which literally meant 'to steer a ship', and that nautical image of guiding a vessel was later applied to guiding a state or an organisation. The Romans had borrowed the idea from the Greek kybernan, also 'to steer', which is the same distant root that gives us the modern word 'cybernetics'. Latin passed gubernare into Old French as governer, and the related noun gouvernance arrived in English during the 1300s meaning the act of ruling or controlling. For centuries it competed with the plainer word 'government', but in modern usage governance has carved out its own niche, describing the systems, processes and accountability by which an organisation is directed. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the ending: the unstressed schwa makes the 'er' easy to drop, and the suffix is -ance rather than the -ence that many similar words take.

How the word is built

• govern (from Latin gubernare: to steer or direct)
• -ance (noun suffix forming a state or action)