Immersion

How to spell immersion

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce immersion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does immersion mean?

1. nounThe state of being completely absorbed or engaged in an activity or environment.
2. nounThe act of dipping or plunging something completely into a liquid.

Immersion in a sentence

• The company offers a week of full immersion in the new accounting software.

• The recipe calls for brief immersion of the vegetables in iced water.

• Learning the language through total immersion proved far faster than evening classes.

• Complete immersion of the metal part removes every trace of grease.

Where does immersion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin verb mergere, meaning 'to dip, sink, or plunge', from which came immergere, formed with the prefix im- (a form of in-, meaning 'into'); the literal sense was to push something down into a liquid. The Latin noun immersio described the act of dipping under, and that is the form English eventually took up. It entered English in the early 1600s, at first in religious and scientific writing, where it described baptism by full submersion or the disappearance of a celestial body behind another. Over time the meaning broadened from physical dipping to the figurative idea of being wholly absorbed in an activity, and later still to the language-teaching method where a learner is surrounded by the target language. The same mergere root surfaces in the everyday relatives 'merge', 'submerge', and 'emerge', which is a useful reminder that the middle of immersion is spelled mers, not merch, and that the double m comes from im- meeting the m of mers.

How the word is built

• im- (in, into)
• mers (from Latin mergere: to dip or plunge)
• -ion (noun of action)