Inject

How to spell inject

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce inject

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inject mean?

1. verbTo force a liquid into something, especially into the body with a needle, or to introduce something new into a system or situation.

Inject in a sentence

• The nurse will inject the vaccine into your upper arm.

• Engineers inject fuel directly into the engine cylinder.

Where does inject come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Inject comes from the Latin injicere, the past participle stem of which is iniectus, meaning 'to throw in' or 'cast into'. It was built from the prefix in-, meaning 'into', and the verb jacere, meaning 'to throw'. English adopted it in the early 1600s, first in the literal sense of forcing a liquid into something, and the modern medical use of driving fluid into the body through a needle grew naturally from that. The same jacere root, glossed as 'to throw', also gives us a whole family of everyday words such as 'eject', 'reject', 'project' and 'subject', so the shared -ject ending is a reliable spelling anchor. Knowing that this final piece is always spelled j-e-c-t keeps the word steady, since the trap is really only the unstressed first syllable.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• ject (from Latin jacere: to throw)