Hospital

How to spell hospital

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce hospital

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hospital mean?

1. nounAn institution providing medical and surgical treatment and nursing care for sick or injured people.

Hospital in a sentence

• The ambulance rushed him to the nearest hospital after the crash.

• She works night shifts as a nurse at the city hospital.

Where does hospital come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin hospitalis, meaning 'relating to a guest', which was built on hospes, a noun that curiously meant both 'host' and 'guest'. In medieval Latin a hospitale was a guest house or a place of shelter for travellers, pilgrims, the poor, and the sick, all of whom were treated as welcome guests. English took the word in through Old French during the 1200s, when it still meant a charitable house of refuge rather than a place purely for medical care; that narrower sense of a building for treating illness grew steadily and became dominant by the 1500s. The same hospes root sprouted a whole family of familiar relatives, including 'host', 'hostel', 'hotel', 'hospice', and 'hospitality', all sharing the idea of receiving guests. Remembering that link to 'hospitality' helps fix the spelling, since both keep the -spit- spelling from the original Latin guest.

How the word is built

• hospit- (from hospes: host, guest)
• -al (noun/adjective suffix)