Irrigation

How to spell irrigation

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce irrigation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does irrigation mean?

1. nounThe supply of water to land or crops through channels, pipes, or sprinklers to help plants grow.
2. nounThe cleansing of a wound or body cavity by flushing it with a flow of liquid.

Irrigation in a sentence

• The farm relies on irrigation during the long dry summer.

• The nurse performed gentle irrigation to clean the wound before stitching it.

• Engineers designed a new irrigation system to channel river water to the fields.

• The dentist used irrigation to rinse debris from the deep cavity.

Where does irrigation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin irrigatio, the act of watering, which was built on the verb irrigare. That verb combined the prefix in-, here meaning 'onto' or 'into' and assimilated to ir- before the r, with rigare, which literally meant 'to wet' or 'to moisten'. Roman writers used it for leading water through channels onto fields and gardens, the very sense it still carries today. English adopted it in the early seventeenth century, first in agricultural and then in medical contexts such as flushing a wound. The doubled r that trips up so many writers is no accident: it is the fossil of that assimilated prefix, the n of in- having shifted to match the r of rigare.

How the word is built

• ir- (variant of in-: onto, into)
• rig (from Latin rigare: to water, to moisten)
• -ation (noun of action)