Mobility

How to spell mobility

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce mobility

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mobility mean?

1. nounThe ability to move or be moved freely and easily.

Mobility in a sentence

• The hip surgery restored much of her mobility within a few months.

• Better public transport improves the mobility of people without cars.

Where does mobility come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin mobilitas, meaning 'movableness' or 'the capacity to be moved', which was built on the adjective mobilis 'easily moved', itself a worn-down form of movibilis from the verb movere 'to move'. English took the word in through Old French mobilite during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it described literal physical movement and also a restless, changeable temperament. Over time the practical senses sharpened: it came to mean ease of movement of the body, of goods and troops, and later the social sense of people moving between classes or jobs. The same movere root underlies a whole family of familiar words such as motion, motor, remove, and the very word mobile, so the spelling stays close to its relatives. The trap for writers is the unstressed middle vowel and the single 'b', since the 'mob-' chunk simply echoes 'mobile' rather than the unrelated noun 'mob'.

How the word is built

• mob- (from movere: to move)
• -ile (capable of)
• -ity (noun: state or quality)