Healthcare

How to spell healthcare

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce healthcare

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does healthcare mean?

1. nounThe organised provision of medical and preventive services to maintain or restore people's health.
2. adjectiveRelating to the provision of medical services, used before a noun.

Healthcare in a sentence

• noun

  The new policy expands healthcare to every rural district.

• adjective

  Thousands of healthcare workers received bonuses this year.

• noun

  Rising healthcare costs are squeezing the family budget.

• adjective

  The company sells software to healthcare providers.

Where does healthcare come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Healthcare is a modern compound built from two very old native English words. The first element, health, descends from the Old English hælth, meaning wholeness or soundness, and is directly related to the word 'whole'; to be healthy was originally to be entire and unbroken. The second element, care, comes from the Old English caru, which carried the surprisingly heavy sense of grief, sorrow, or burdensome concern before it softened into the modern idea of looking after something. The two words travelled separately for centuries and were long written apart as 'health care', a usage still common in formal prose. They fused into the single closed form healthcare only in the twentieth century, when the organised delivery of medical services became a fixed concept in its own right. That recent fusion is exactly why writers still hesitate over whether to leave a space, and the one-word spelling is now the standard in most fields.

How the word is built

• health (Old English hælth: wholeness, soundness of body)
• care (Old English caru: concern, attention)