Immortality

How to spell immortality

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce immortality

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does immortality mean?

1. nounThe state of living forever or never dying.
2. nounLasting fame or remembrance that outlives a person.

Immortality in a sentence

• Many ancient myths describe a quest for immortality.

• That championship goal earned the striker a kind of sporting immortality.

• The philosophy seminar debated whether the soul possesses immortality.

• The novelist hoped her best book would grant her literary immortality.

Where does immortality come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin immortalitas, meaning 'the state of never dying', which was built on the adjective immortalis, 'undying'. That adjective was formed from the negative prefix in- (here 'not') attached to mortalis, 'subject to death', which itself grew from mors, mortis, the Latin word for 'death'. English took the word in during the late 1300s by way of Old French immortalite, at first in religious and philosophical writing about the soul living on after the body dies. The very same mors root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'mortal', 'mortgage' (originally a 'dead pledge'), and 'mortuary', so recognising that buried 'mort' (death) helps fix the spelling. The doubled m at the start is the usual trap, since it comes from the prefix in- shifting to im- before the m of mort, leaving two m's pressed together.

How the word is built

• im- (not)
• mort (death, from Latin mors)
• -al (relating to)
• -ity (noun suffix)