Ordinary

How to spell ordinary

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce ordinary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ordinary mean?

1. adjectiveNormal or usual; with no special or distinctive features.

Ordinary in a sentence

• It was an ordinary day at the office, with nothing unusual on the schedule.

• The recipe uses ordinary flour rather than any special blend.

Where does ordinary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin ordinarius, meaning 'in the usual order' or 'according to regular arrangement', which was built on ordo (genitive ordinis), the Latin noun for an order, a rank, or a row of things laid out in sequence. The same ordo root sits behind a whole family of English words, including order, ordain, coordinate, and subordinate, all carrying the idea of things put into their proper place. English took ordinary in through Old French during the 1300s and 1400s, at first in fairly technical senses to do with regular procedure and officials who held a fixed jurisdiction, and only later settling into the everyday meaning of 'normal' or 'commonplace'. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the end: the unstressed syllables blur in speech, so writers drop the 'a' before the final 'ry' or forget the 'din' that links it back to ordo. Remembering the root 'ordin', as in 'order', anchors that middle stretch and keeps the word from collapsing into 'ordinry'.

How the word is built

• ordin- (from Latin ordo, ordinis: order, rank, row)
• -ary (adjective suffix meaning 'relating to')