Individual

How to spell individual

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce individual

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does individual mean?

1. nounA single person considered separately from a group.
2. adjectiveRelating to a single, separate, or distinct person or thing.

Individual in a sentence

• noun

  The new policy treats each individual as a separate case.

• adjective

  Each guest received an individual portion on a small plate.

• noun

  The survey asks every individual to record their own spending.

• adjective

  The teacher gives individual feedback to every student.

Where does individual come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin individuus, meaning 'indivisible' or 'not able to be split', which was built from the negative prefix in- ('not') and dividuus ('divisible'), itself from dividere, 'to divide'. The original idea was therefore something so unified that it could not be broken into parts. When it entered English in the late 1400s through medieval Latin, it first carried this very technical sense of 'indivisible', often in theological and logical writing. Over the following centuries the meaning shifted from 'the thing that cannot be divided' to 'the single thing or person considered on its own', which is the everyday sense we use today. The buried word divide explains the spelling: keeping 'divid' visible in the middle, then adding -ual, helps you avoid dropping a letter from that tricky run of vowels.

How the word is built

• in- (not)
• dividu- (from Latin dividuus: divisible, from dividere: to divide)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)