Isolation

How to spell isolation

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce isolation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does isolation mean?

1. nounThe state of being separated or cut off from other people or things.
2. nounThe act of separating one thing from others, especially to study or identify it.

Isolation in a sentence

• Working from a remote cabin gave him a deep sense of isolation.

• The lab confirmed the isolation of the active compound from the sample.

• The patient was kept in isolation to stop the infection spreading.

• Careful isolation of each variable made the experiment easier to interpret.

Where does isolation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Isolation traces back to the Latin insula, meaning 'island', the same root that gives us 'insular' and 'peninsula'. Italian speakers turned insula into the adjective isolato, literally 'made into an island', to describe something cut off and standing alone. French borrowed this as isoler, the verb 'to isolate', and from it formed the noun isolation, which English adopted in the eighteenth century. The original image is vivid and worth holding onto: to isolate something is to surround it with water like an island, leaving it apart from everything else. Notice that the spelling keeps a single 's' from insula and drops the Latin 'n', so the word is spelled iso-, not isso- or insol-.

How the word is built

• isol- (from Latin insula: island, via isolate)
• -ation (noun-forming suffix)