Mysterious

How to spell mysterious

10 letters · 4 syllables

The most common mistake is misterious. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

misterious mysterious

What people typed instead

• misterious3 people

How to pronounce mysterious

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mysterious mean?

1. adjectiveDifficult or impossible to understand, explain, or identify; full of mystery.

Mysterious in a sentence

• A mysterious package arrived at the office with no return address.

• The accountant noticed a mysterious charge on the company statement.

Where does mysterious come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word descends from the Greek mysterion, meaning a secret rite or hidden truth, which was bound up with the ancient mystery cults whose ceremonies were closed to outsiders. The root verb myein meant 'to close the lips or eyes', capturing the idea of something kept shut away from the uninitiated. Latin took the noun over as mysterium, and Old French passed it into English as 'mystery' in the 1300s, at first with strong religious overtones. The adjective 'mysterious' was formed in English in the late 1500s by adding the Latin-derived ending -ious, meaning 'full of'. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle and the ending: writers must remember the y in 'myst', the -ter- in the middle, and the -ious ending rather than -ous, since the i is easy to drop in speech.

How the word is built

• myster- (from Greek mysterion: secret rite, hidden thing)
• -ious (adjective suffix: full of)