Infrastructure

How to spell infrastructure

14 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce infrastructure

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does infrastructure mean?

1. nounThe basic physical and organisational systems (such as roads, power, and networks) needed for a society or enterprise to operate.

Infrastructure in a sentence

• The city secured funding to repair its ageing transport infrastructure.

• Poor broadband infrastructure slows down every business in the region.

Where does infrastructure come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a relatively modern compound, formed by joining the Latin prefix infra-, meaning 'below' or 'beneath', to the word structure, which itself descends from the Latin structura, 'a building or arrangement', built on the verb struere, 'to pile up, to build'. The same struere root quietly underpins a whole family of English words including construct, instruct, destroy, and structure itself. The compound seems to have emerged in French as infrastructure in the late nineteenth century, originally a railway engineering term for the underlying groundwork (embankments, bridges, and tracks) on which the visible operations of a line depended. English adopted it in the early twentieth century and broadened it to mean the basic underlying systems that support a society or organisation. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle, where the careful sequence -frastruc- can blur in speech, and in remembering that it ends in -ture rather than the sound-alike -cher.

How the word is built

• infra- (below, beneath)
• struct (from Latin struere: to build)
• -ure (noun suffix)