Nationwide

How to spell nationwide

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nationwide

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nationwide mean?

1. adjectiveExtending throughout or affecting the whole of a country.
2. adverbThroughout the whole of a country.

Nationwide in a sentence

• adjective

  The retailer launched a nationwide recall of the faulty heaters.

• adverb

  The new product will be available nationwide from next month.

• adjective

  A nationwide survey showed that most workers wanted flexible hours.

• adverb

  Prices for second-hand cars rose nationwide over the summer.

Where does nationwide come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound built from two older pieces. The first half, 'nation', came into English in the 1300s through Old French from the Latin natio, which literally meant 'a breed, a stock, or a people born together', from nasci 'to be born'; the same birth root sits inside 'native' and 'nature'. The second half, 'wide', is a thoroughly native Old English word, wid, meaning 'broad' or 'extending far', and it shares its ancestry with German weit. The two were welded together in the early twentieth century, largely in American commercial and political English, to describe something reaching across an entire country. Because both parts are familiar everyday words, the only real spelling question is whether to hyphenate; modern usage favours the single solid form 'nationwide', with no break between 'nation' and 'wide'.

How the word is built

• nation (a people or country, from Latin natio)
• -wide (extending throughout, from Old English wid)