Limitation

How to spell limitation

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce limitation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does limitation mean?

1. nounA restriction, boundary, or shortcoming that limits what is possible.

Limitation in a sentence

• The budget places a strict limitation on how many staff we can hire.

• Every tool has at least one limitation that engineers must work around.

Where does limitation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin limitare, meaning 'to bound' or 'to set a boundary', which was built on limes (genitive limitis), a noun that literally meant a boundary line, a path between fields, or the fortified frontier of the Roman empire. From limitare the Latins formed limitatio, the act or fact of fixing such a boundary, and that abstract noun is the direct ancestor of our word. English took it in through Old French during the late 1300s, at first in the sense of a fixed limit or restriction. The same limes root survives in the modern word 'limit' itself, and the spelling trap lies in remembering the single t before the -ation, since the sound gives no clue that the ending is -tation rather than a doubled consonant.

How the word is built

• limit (from Latin limes/limit-: boundary)
• -ation (noun of action/state)