Missionary

How to spell missionary

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce missionary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does missionary mean?

1. nounA person sent, usually abroad, to promote a religious faith or to carry out charitable work.
2. adjectiveRelating to or characteristic of a religious or charitable mission.

Missionary in a sentence

• noun

  The missionary spent twelve years teaching in a remote village.

• adjective

  The church funded a new missionary project in the city's poorest district.

• noun

  Her grandfather served as a missionary in West Africa.

• adjective

  She approached her volunteer work with almost missionary zeal.

Where does missionary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb mittere, meaning 'to send', whose past-participle stem missus gave the noun missio, literally 'a sending' or 'a dispatch'. From this came the Modern Latin missionarius, describing a person who is sent out, particularly one sent abroad to spread a religious faith. English adopted the form in the early 1600s, when European churches were energetically dispatching agents to other continents, and the religious sense quickly dominated. The same mittere root sits inside a large family of everyday words including 'mission', 'transmit', 'dismiss', and 'permit', all of which involve some idea of sending or letting go. The double s in the spelling preserves the Latin missus, while the ending follows the -ary pattern of one connected with a thing, which is exactly where careful writers must resist the tempting but wrong -ery.

How the word is built

• miss- (from Latin mittere: to send)
• -ion (noun of action)
• -ary (one connected with)