Humanities

How to spell humanities

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce humanities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does humanities mean?

1. nounThe branches of learning concerned with human culture, such as literature, history, philosophy, and languages, as distinct from the sciences.

Humanities in a sentence

• She funded a scholarship for students in the humanities.

• The university cut its budget for the arts and humanities.

Where does humanities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin humanitas, which meant 'human nature' but also 'culture, refinement, and education befitting a civilised person'. That noun grew from humanus, meaning 'human' or 'belonging to mankind', itself related to homo, the Latin word for a person. English borrowed the singular 'humanity' through Old French in the late 1300s, carrying both the sense of compassion toward fellow people and the sense of cultured learning. By the Renaissance the plural 'the humanities' came to label the studia humanitatis, the literary and classical subjects scholars studied to cultivate the mind, in contrast to divinity and the sciences. The spelling keeps the steady -an-it-ies pattern, and the trap for writers is the unstressed middle, since the schwa in '-anit-' gives no clue whether to write an 'i' there.

How the word is built

• human- (from Latin humanus: human, of mankind)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix denoting a quality or state)
• -es (plural)