Mindfulness

How to spell mindfulness

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mindfulness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mindfulness mean?

1. nounA calm, deliberate awareness of the present moment, often cultivated through meditation or focused attention.

Mindfulness in a sentence

• The clinic offers a course in mindfulness to help patients manage stress.

• Practising mindfulness each morning helped her stay focused at work.

Where does mindfulness come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built entirely from native English parts. At its heart is 'mind', which comes from the Old English 'gemynd', meaning 'memory' or 'thought', a relative of words across the Germanic family and ultimately tied to an ancient root meaning 'to think'. To this was added '-ful', an Old English suffix meaning 'full of' or 'marked by', giving the adjective 'mindful', recorded from around the 1300s with the sense of being attentive or heedful. The further suffix '-ness', also Old English, turns an adjective into the name of a state, so 'mindfulness' literally means 'the quality of being full of mind', that is, of paying close attention. Although the word is centuries old in English, its modern popularity comes from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when scholars chose it to translate the Buddhist term 'sati', a kind of moment-to-moment awareness, and it has since spread into everyday talk about meditation and wellbeing. The spelling trap is the quiet single 'l' in '-ful': the suffix is always spelled with one 'l', even though 'full' on its own has two.

How the word is built

• mind (the thinking faculty)
• -ful (full of, characterised by)
• -ness (state or quality of being)