Inquiry

How to spell inquiry

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce inquiry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inquiry mean?

1. nounAn act of asking for information or a question put to someone.
2. nounAn official or systematic examination of facts, often into a problem or event.

Inquiry in a sentence

• The hotel received an inquiry about room availability for the holiday weekend.

• The government ordered a public inquiry into the cause of the rail accident.

• She sent a polite inquiry to the supplier regarding the delayed shipment.

• A lengthy inquiry found that safety procedures had been ignored.

Where does inquiry come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb quaerere, which meant 'to seek, search for, or ask'. Adding the prefix in- in the sense of 'into' produced inquirere, literally 'to seek into' something, and the related noun inquisitio described a searching investigation. English took the verb in through Old French enquerre during the medieval period, which is why the British variant 'enquiry' still survives alongside 'inquiry'; the 'i' spelling was later re-aligned with the Latin original. The same quaerere root gave us a whole family of relatives, including 'question', 'query', 'acquire', and the more sinister 'inquisition'. The spelling trap is that unstressed second vowel and the q-u pairing: it is 'quir' not 'quier', and the ending is '-iry' not '-ery'.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• quir (from Latin quaerere: to seek, ask)
• -y (noun suffix)