Missionaries

How to spell missionaries

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce missionaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does missionaries mean?

1. nounPeople sent out, typically by a religious organisation, to promote their faith or to provide charitable services in another community or country.

Missionaries in a sentence

• The church sent two missionaries to build a clinic in the remote village.

• Records show that early missionaries founded the first school in the region.

Where does missionaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb mittere, meaning 'to send', and its past-participle form missus, which gave rise to missio, literally 'a sending' or 'a dispatching'. From missio came the Church Latin missionarius, describing a person sent out, especially someone sent abroad to spread a religious faith. English adopted 'missionary' in the early 1600s, during a great age of organised religious expeditions, with the plural 'missionaries' simply adding the regular plural ending. The same mittere root is buried inside a surprising family of everyday words, including 'mission', 'transmit', 'dismiss', and 'permit', all sharing that core idea of sending. The spelling trap lives in two places: the doubled s near the front (mirroring 'mission') and the ending, where the -y of the singular turns to -ies, not the often-mistyped -arys.

How the word is built

• miss- (from mittere: to send)
• -ion (act/result)
• -ary (one connected with)
• -es (plural)