Immaculate

How to spell immaculate

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce immaculate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does immaculate mean?

1. adjectivePerfectly clean, tidy, or free from any flaw or mistake.

Immaculate in a sentence

• The hotel room was immaculate when we arrived, with everything in its place.

• Her financial records were immaculate, so the audit took only an hour.

Where does immaculate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin immaculatus, which meant 'unstained' or 'without a single spot'. It was built from the negative prefix im-, meaning 'not', joined to maculatus, the past participle of maculare, 'to stain or spot', which in turn rests on the noun macula, meaning a 'spot, blemish, or mark'. English adopted it in the late 1400s, often in religious contexts such as the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, where it described a state entirely free of moral stain. From that spiritual sense it broadened into the everyday meaning of perfectly clean, flawless, or spotless. The same Latin macula survives in 'maculate' and even in 'macula', the term for the spot at the centre of the retina, and remembering that buried macula explains the spelling: it is im plus macula plus ate, with the doubled m coming from the prefix sitting against the root.

How the word is built

• im- (not)
• macul (from Latin macula: spot, stain)
• -ate (adjective suffix)