Nationality

How to spell nationality

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce nationality

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nationality mean?

1. nounThe status of belonging to a particular nation, usually by birth or by legal citizenship.

Nationality in a sentence

• The form asked for her full name, date of birth, and nationality.

• Holding dual nationality lets him keep two passports.

Where does nationality come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb nasci, meaning 'to be born', whose past participle natus gave rise to natio, a word for a birth, a tribe, or a people sharing a common descent. From natio came the sense of a body of people born in or belonging to the same land, which passed into Old French as nacion and then into English as 'nation' during the 1300s. The longer form 'nationality' was built later, around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by stacking the noun-forming suffix -ity onto the adjective 'national', so it literally names the quality of belonging to a particular nation. The same nasci root quietly underlies a surprising spread of everyday words, including 'native', 'nature', 'innate', and even 'pregnant', all of which circle back to the idea of being born. Remembering that family connection helps with the spelling, since the core stays 'nation' and the ending is simply the standard -ality run of letters.

How the word is built

• nat- (from Latin natus: born)
• -ion (state of)
• -al (adjective)
• -ity (noun: quality or state)