Legitimacy

How to spell legitimacy

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce legitimacy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does legitimacy mean?

1. nounThe quality of being lawful, genuine, or widely accepted as valid and justified.

Legitimacy in a sentence

• The opposition questioned the legitimacy of the election results.

• The new tax was challenged in court, casting doubt on its legal legitimacy.

Where does legitimacy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin legitimus, meaning 'lawful' or 'according to the law', which was itself built on lex, the Latin word for 'law' (seen in its stem leg-). In medieval Latin the related form legitimare meant 'to make lawful', and English absorbed the family through Old French during the late Middle Ages, first in legal contexts concerning lawful birth and rightful inheritance. The abstract noun legitimacy, formed with the Latin-derived suffix -acy that turns an adjective into a state or quality, came into English use around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to name the condition of being lawful, genuine, or properly authorised. Over time its sense broadened from strictly legal lawfulness to the wider idea of being justified or accepted as valid, as when we speak of the legitimacy of a government or an argument. The same lex root underlies a whole cluster of familiar words such as legal, legislate, and legitimate, and remembering that shared 'leg' helps explain the spelling: it is leg-it-im-acy, not 'ledg', and it ends in -macy rather than '-massy'.

How the word is built

• legitim- (from legitimus: lawful, from lex 'law')
• -acy (noun suffix denoting state or quality)