Lateral

How to spell lateral

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce lateral

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lateral mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to, located at, or moving toward the side of something.
2. nounA sideways or backward pass thrown parallel to the goal line in American and Canadian football.

Lateral in a sentence

• adjective

  The surgeon noted swelling on the lateral side of the knee.

• noun

  The running back flipped a quick lateral to his teammate before being tackled.

• adjective

  Engineers added braces to resist lateral movement during an earthquake.

• noun

  The desperate final play involved one lateral after another down the field.

Where does lateral come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin adjective lateralis, meaning 'belonging to the side', which was built on the noun latus (in its stem form lateris), the ordinary Latin word for a side or flank of the body. English took it up in the 1600s, at first in technical and anatomical contexts where writers needed a precise term for something positioned at or moving toward the side rather than the front or back. From there it spread into engineering, botany, linguistics, and eventually everyday phrases such as 'lateral thinking', which describes solving a problem by approaching it from an unexpected angle. The same Latin latus survives in relatives like 'bilateral' (two-sided) and 'collateral' (literally placed side by side), so recognising that buried 'later' meaning 'side' helps fix the spelling. The trap for writers is the unstressed middle, which sounds like a vague 'er', tempting people to drop or swap the vowel before the final -al.

How the word is built

• later- (from Latin latus, lateris: side)
• -al (adjective suffix)