Homogeneous

How to spell homogeneous

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce homogeneous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does homogeneous mean?

1. adjectiveConsisting of parts or elements that are all of the same kind, so the whole is uniform throughout.

Homogeneous in a sentence

• The survey showed a remarkably homogeneous group of customers with almost identical buying habits.

• To get a homogeneous mixture, the technician stirred the solution until no separate layers remained.

Where does homogeneous come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the Greek homogenes, which combined homos, meaning 'same', with genos, meaning 'kind', 'race', or 'type'. The literal sense was therefore 'of the same kind throughout', a thing whose parts all share one nature. It passed into scholarly English in the early seventeenth century by way of Medieval Latin homogeneus, where it served scientists and philosophers describing uniform substances. The genos root is enormously productive and still surfaces in everyday relatives such as 'genus', 'genre', 'gene', and 'generate', all of which carry the idea of kind or origin. The classic spelling trap lives in the ending: the correct form keeps the full - geneous with the extra e, so it reads ho-mo-GEE-nee-ous, which is why the shorter look-alike 'homogenous' so often slips out by mistake.

How the word is built

• homo- (same)
• gen (kind, race, type)
• -eous (adjective suffix: having the nature of)