Heterogeneous

How to spell heterogeneous

13 letters · 5 syllables

17 of the 25 people asked to spell heterogeneous in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is heterogenious. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

heterogenious heterogeneous

What people typed instead

• heterogenious5 people
• heterogenius4 people
• hetrogeneous3 people

How to pronounce heterogeneous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heterogeneous mean?

1. adjectiveMade up of parts or members that are different in kind, varied, or not uniform.

Heterogeneous in a sentence

• The survey covered a heterogeneous group of customers from many different backgrounds.

• The soil sample was heterogeneous, mixing clay, sand, and small stones.

Where does heterogeneous come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the Greek heterogenes, which combined heteros, meaning 'other' or 'different', with genos, meaning 'kind', 'race', or 'type'. Put together, the original sense was simply 'of a different kind', describing things that are not all the same. It passed into scholarly use through the Late Latin form heterogeneus and surfaced in English in the early 1600s, when natural philosophers and theologians needed a precise word for matter or groups made up of unlike parts. The opposite term, 'homogeneous', built on Greek homos meaning 'same', entered English in the same period and is its natural partner. The same genos root sits inside everyday words such as 'genus', 'genre', and 'gene', all dealing with kind or origin, and it is that buried gen plus the unusual -eous ending that makes the modern spelling so easy to trip over.

How the word is built

• hetero- (different)
• gen (kind, race, type)
• -eous (adjective suffix)

People who misspell heterogeneous also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got heterogeneous wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• connoisseur 100% of them got it wrong
• chihuahua 55% of them got it wrong