Intermediary

How to spell intermediary

12 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce intermediary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does intermediary mean?

1. nounA person or organisation that acts as a link or negotiator between two parties.
2. adjectiveSituated or occurring between two stages, points, or things.

Intermediary in a sentence

• noun

  The agent acted as an intermediary between the buyer and the seller.

• adjective

  The project passed through an intermediary phase before final approval.

• noun

  The bank serves as a financial intermediary for the two companies.

• adjective

  The chemical forms an intermediary compound during the reaction.

Where does intermediary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin medius, meaning 'middle', combined with the preposition inter, meaning 'between' or 'among'. From these came the Latin intermedius, describing something lying in the middle of two things, and the later Medieval Latin intermediarius for a person or thing standing in between. English absorbed it in the early 1600s, partly with help from the French intermédiaire, which carried the same idea of a go-between. The same medius root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'medium', 'median', and 'mediate', all sharing that sense of a middle point. The spelling trap lives in the cluster of unstressed vowels at the end, the '-iary', where the second 'i' is easy to drop and the '-ary' is easily mistaken for '-ery'.

How the word is built

• inter- (between)
• medi (from Latin medius: middle)
• -ary (noun/adjective suffix)