Legality

How to spell legality

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce legality

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does legality mean?

1. nounThe state of being permitted or conforming to the law.

Legality in a sentence

• The board questioned the legality of the proposed merger.

• Lawyers debated the legality of the new surveillance policy.

Where does legality come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin lex, with stem leg-, meaning 'law', the same root behind 'legal', 'legislate', and 'legitimate'. From this came the medieval Latin legalitas, a noun describing the quality of being lawful or conforming to the law. English picked it up through French in the early seventeenth century, when writers needed an abstract term for the state of being permitted by law rather than merely the adjective 'legal'. The unstressed middle vowel, the -al- you can barely hear, is the main spelling snag, and it is the leg- root that fixes it: think of the related 'legal' to keep the spelling steady. The same family also gives us 'loyal', which slipped in through a different French route from the very same Latin source.

How the word is built

• leg- (from lex/legis: law)
• -al (relating to)
• -ity (noun of state)