Inflammatory

How to spell inflammatory

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce inflammatory

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inflammatory mean?

1. adjectiveTending to arouse strong feelings of anger, hostility, or excitement.
2. adjectiveRelating to or causing inflammation of body tissue, such as redness, heat, and swelling.

Inflammatory in a sentence

• The politician was criticised for making inflammatory remarks about his rivals.

• The doctor prescribed an anti-inflammatory drug to reduce the swelling in his knee.

• The newspaper toned down the inflammatory headline before publication.

• Chronic inflammatory conditions can cause lasting damage to the joints.

Where does inflammatory come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb inflammare, which literally meant 'to set on fire' or 'to kindle', built from the prefix in- ('into, in') and flamma, the ordinary Latin word for a 'flame'. From the simple idea of bursting into flame, Latin and later French extended the sense figuratively to the heating up of emotions and of the body, so something inflammatory was anything that fanned the fire of anger or of physical swelling. English took the adjective in during the early 1700s, by which time it carried both the medical meaning of provoking inflammation and the rhetorical meaning of stirring people to passion. The same flamma root burns quietly inside everyday relatives such as 'flame', 'flammable', and 'flamboyant'. The spelling trap is that double m, inherited straight from Latin flamma, which writers routinely reduce to a single letter.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• flamm (from Latin flamma: flame)
• -atory (adjective suffix meaning 'tending to')