Impurities

How to spell impurities

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce impurities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does impurities mean?

1. nounUnwanted substances or particles mixed into something, making it less clean or pure.

Impurities in a sentence

• The filter removes impurities from the drinking water before it reaches the tap.

• Refining the metal burns off the impurities that weaken the final alloy.

Where does impurities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin adjective purus, which meant 'clean, unmixed, or free from dirt'. From purus came the noun puritas, 'cleanness', and its negative form impuritas, built with the prefix in- meaning 'not' (which softens to im- before the letter p). Latin impuritas described a state of being unclean or contaminated, and English absorbed the family through Old French during the medieval period, with 'impurity' settling into written English by the 1500s. The plural 'impurities' came to name the specific foreign particles or substances that spoil something otherwise clean, especially in the language of metallurgy, chemistry, and refining. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the silent flow from 'pur' into the schwa of '-ity' tempts writers to drop or swap vowels, and the doubled idea of im- plus pure can blur into a single sound.

How the word is built

• im- (not)
• pur (from Latin purus: clean, pure)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)
• -es (plural)