Mentality

How to spell mentality

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce mentality

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mentality mean?

1. nounA characteristic attitude or established way of thinking held by a person or group.

Mentality in a sentence

• The team adopted a winning mentality before the final match.

• His cautious mentality made him double-check every figure in the report.

Where does mentality come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun mens, mentis, which literally meant 'mind' and is the same root that gives us 'mental' and 'mention'. From it scholars built a Late Latin adjective mentalis, meaning 'of the mind', which passed into English as 'mental' by way of French in the late medieval period. The fuller noun 'mentality' was assembled later, in the seventeenth century, by adding the abstract suffix -ity to express a state or quality of mind. Originally it carried a fairly philosophical sense of mental power or the faculty of thinking, but over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it drifted toward its everyday modern meaning: a characteristic way of thinking or attitude. The spelling trap lies in the unstressed middle, where the 'ta' and 'li' syllables blur together, so it helps to remember the building blocks mental plus the familiar -ity ending.

How the word is built

• ment- (from Latin mens, mentis: mind)
• -al (adjective: relating to)
• -ity (noun: state or quality)