Infancy

How to spell infancy

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce infancy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does infancy mean?

1. nounThe earliest period of a person's life, the time when they are a baby.
2. nounThe very first stage in the development of something such as a technology, business, or field of study.

Infancy in a sentence

• The records of her infancy were stored in a faded photo album.

• Electric cars were still in their infancy when the company launched.

• The disease is usually caught in infancy before a child can walk.

• The research field was in its infancy and few people understood it.

Where does infancy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin infantia, meaning 'the state of being unable to speak', which was built from infans, the word for a young child. Infans itself joined the negative prefix in-, meaning 'not', to fans, a form of the verb fari, meaning 'to speak', so an infant was literally one who could not yet talk. English took the word in through Old French during the medieval period, and over time it broadened from the strict idea of a speechless baby to mean the earliest period of life in general. From there it stretched further into a useful figurative sense, the very first stage of anything, such as a company, a science, or a technology. The same fari root survives in 'fable', 'fame', and 'preface', all of which involve speaking or telling. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: writers reliably hear the f and the n but can blur the faint vowel between them and the closing -cy.

How the word is built

• in- (not)
• fa- (root of Latin fari: to speak)
• -nt (present participle)
• -cy (noun suffix: state or condition)