Humidity

How to spell humidity

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce humidity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does humidity mean?

1. nounThe amount of water vapour present in the air, often felt as dampness or stickiness.

Humidity in a sentence

• The tropical climate brings high humidity all year round.

• The museum controls the humidity to protect its old paintings.

Where does humidity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin humiditas, meaning 'moistness' or 'dampness', which was built on the adjective humidus, 'wet' or 'moist'. That adjective in turn came from the verb humere, 'to be moist', and English writers often connected it to humus, the Latin word for 'earth' or 'soil', which is why the spelling carried an h at the front. English took the word in through Old French in the late fourteenth century, originally in medical and scientific writing about the moisture content of air and bodies. Over the centuries it settled into its modern meteorological sense, describing the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. The silent, almost-forgotten h at the start is the usual spelling trap, a quiet echo of the Latin root that the modern pronunciation barely sounds.

How the word is built

• humid- (from Latin humidus: moist, damp)
• -ity (noun suffix forming a state or quality)