Inquisition

How to spell inquisition

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce inquisition

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inquisition mean?

1. nounA prolonged, severe, or aggressive period of questioning or investigation.

Inquisition in a sentence

• The job interview felt less like a chat and more like an inquisition.

• Every late expense claim triggered a full inquisition from the finance team.

Where does inquisition come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin inquisitio, meaning 'a searching into' or 'an examination', which was formed from the verb inquirere, 'to seek into' or 'to investigate'. That verb joins the prefix in-, meaning 'into', with quaerere, 'to seek or ask', the same root that gives us 'query', 'question', 'inquire', and 'acquire'. English took the word in through Old French during the 1300s, where it first carried the neutral legal sense of a formal inquiry. The meaning darkened when it became attached to the Inquisition, the Roman Catholic tribunals set up to root out heresy, and from those harsh interrogations the word picked up its modern flavour of relentless, oppressive questioning. The spelling trap lies in the middle: the 'quis' preserves the original quaerere root, so the letter sequence q-u-i-s rather than a simple 'kw' sound is worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• quis (from Latin quaerere, to seek or ask)
• -ition (noun-forming suffix)