Multiculturalism

How to spell multiculturalism

16 letters · 7 syllables

How to pronounce multiculturalism

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does multiculturalism mean?

1. nounThe presence of, or support for, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within one society.

Multiculturalism in a sentence

• The city council promotes multiculturalism through funding for community festivals.

• Her thesis examined how multiculturalism shaped national education policy in the 1980s.

Where does multiculturalism come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound that assembles two Latin building blocks. The prefix multi- comes from the Latin multus, meaning 'much' or 'many', and it pairs with cultura, a Latin noun for 'cultivation' or 'tending', which itself grew from the verb colere, 'to till, to care for, or to inhabit'. Over centuries cultura broadened from the literal working of soil into the figurative cultivation of the mind, manners, and shared ways of life that we now call 'culture'. The full word multiculturalism is recent rather than ancient: it was coined in English (with notable early use in Canada) during the second half of the twentieth century to describe a society that recognises and supports many distinct cultural communities living together. The -ism ending, ultimately from Greek by way of Latin, marks it as a named policy or belief, and the long string of unstressed syllables in the middle is exactly where careful writers slow down.

How the word is built

• multi- (many)
• cultur- (from Latin cultura: cultivation, culture)
• -al (adjective)
• -ism (system or doctrine)