Nationalities

How to spell nationalities

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce nationalities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nationalities mean?

1. nounGroups of people defined by the nations or countries to which they belong, or the legal statuses of citizenship those people hold.

Nationalities in a sentence

• The conference welcomed delegates of more than forty different nationalities.

• The form asked applicants to list any other nationalities they currently held.

Where does nationalities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin natio, meaning 'a people' or 'a race', which itself grew from nasci, the verb 'to be born', so a nation was originally a group bound together by common birth or descent. From natio English developed 'nation' through Old French during the medieval period, and the abstract noun 'nationality' was later coined by adding the Latin suffix -itas (English -ity), which turns an adjective into a noun naming a state or quality. By the early 1800s 'nationality' meant the fact of belonging to a particular nation, and its plural 'nationalities' came to describe the various national groups gathered in one place. The same nasci root quietly survives in everyday relatives such as 'native', 'nature', and 'innate', all of which circle around the idea of being born. The spelling trap lies in the stacked endings: the unstressed -al feeding into -ity before the plural -ies, so writers must remember every layer rather than collapsing them.

How the word is built

• nat- (from Latin natus: born)
• -ion (state of)
• -al (adjective)
• -ity (noun, condition of)
• -ies (plural)