Partial

How to spell partial

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce partial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does partial mean?

1. adjectiveExisting or happening only in part; not complete or total.
2. adjectiveUnfairly favouring one side, person, or thing over another; biased.

Partial in a sentence

• The insurer offered only a partial refund on the cancelled trip.

• A referee must never be partial toward the home team.

• Engineers reported a partial collapse of the old bridge.

• Critics accused the panel of being partial in its hiring decisions.

Where does partial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin partialis, an adjective built on pars (in its accusative form partem), meaning simply 'a part' or 'a portion'. The literal sense was therefore 'relating to a part rather than the whole', which survives directly in the modern meaning of 'incomplete'. English took it up in the late 1300s through Old French parcial, and from quite early on it also carried a figurative sense: a judge or observer who was 'partial' sided with only one part or side, so the word came to mean biased or unfairly favouring. The same Latin pars sits inside a large family of everyday words such as part, particle, partner, portion and party. The spelling trap is the ending: the sound is a soft 'shul', but it is written -tial, not -cial or -shul, mirroring its Latin -tialis root.

How the word is built

• part (from Latin pars/partem: a part, portion)
• -ial (adjective suffix)