Nutritional

How to spell nutritional

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce nutritional

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nutritional mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the nourishment a food provides or to the process of nutrition.

Nutritional in a sentence

• The label lists the nutritional content of each serving.

• A balanced diet meets all your nutritional needs.

Where does nutritional come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb nutrire, which meant 'to nourish, to suckle, or to feed', the same root that gave us 'nourish', 'nutrient', and 'nurse'. From nutrire came the noun 'nutrition', borrowed into English through Old French and Latin around the early 1400s to describe the process of feeding and being nourished. The adjective 'nutritional' is a later English formation, built by adding the familiar -al ending to 'nutrition', and it came into common use in the 1800s as the science of diet and food chemistry developed. The spelling keeps the -tion cluster intact, so the trap is the soft 'sh' sound spelled 'ti', plus the unstressed vowels that all reduce to a faint schwa. A handy memory aid is that 'nutritional' simply stacks the adjective ending -al onto the whole noun 'nutrition', losing nothing along the way.

How the word is built

• nutri- (from Latin nutrire: to nourish, feed)
• -tion (noun-forming suffix)
• -al (adjective-forming suffix)