Municipalities

How to spell municipalities

14 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce municipalities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does municipalities mean?

1. nounTowns, cities, or districts that each have their own local government, considered as a group.

Municipalities in a sentence

• Several neighbouring municipalities agreed to share a single waste collection service.

• The grant was divided among rural municipalities struggling to fund their road repairs.

Where does municipalities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin municipium, the term for a self-governing town in the Roman world whose citizens took on civic duties in exchange for certain privileges. That noun was built from munus, meaning a 'duty' or 'public office', and capere, meaning 'to take on', so a municipium was literally a community that shouldered its own public burdens. By the late 1500s English had borrowed the adjective 'municipal' from Latin (often by way of French) to describe anything relating to local town government. The noun 'municipality', meaning a town or district with its own local government, followed and was widely used from the early 1700s, and 'municipalities' is simply its plural. The shared munus root also survives in 'remunerate' and 'munificent', and the unstressed middle of the word (the faint -ci- before -pal-) is exactly where the spelling trips writers up.

How the word is built

• muni- (from munus: duty, public office)
• -cip- (from capere: to take on)
• -al (adjective)
• -ity (noun, state of)
• -ies (plural)