Hospitality

How to spell hospitality

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce hospitality

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hospitality mean?

1. nounThe friendly and generous reception and treatment of guests or visitors.

Hospitality in a sentence

• The family thanked their hosts for the warm hospitality shown all weekend.

• After years managing hotels, she moved into teaching hospitality at the local college.

Where does hospitality come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin hospitalitas, the quality of being friendly toward guests, which was built on hospes, a noun that curiously meant both 'host' and 'guest', the two sides of the same welcoming relationship. The hospes root in turn combined hostis, originally 'stranger' (and later 'enemy'), with an element meaning 'lord' or 'master', so the literal idea was the master who receives a stranger. English took the word in through Old French ospitalite during the 1300s, and over time the spelling regained its Latin 'h'. The same family gave us 'hospital' (first a guesthouse or shelter for travellers), 'hostel', and even 'hotel', which all trace back to that single notion of taking in outsiders. The spelling trap is the quiet middle: the unstressed '-pit-' and the '-ality' ending both reduce to schwa in speech, so the vowels are easy to muddle.

How the word is built

• hospit- (from Latin hospes: host, guest)
• -al (adjective)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)