Participation

How to spell participation

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce participation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does participation mean?

1. nounThe act of taking part or being involved in an activity, event, or group.

Participation in a sentence

• The teacher gave each pupil marks for participation in class discussions.

• Attendance was high, but active participation from the audience was disappointing.

Where does participation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb participare, meaning literally 'to share in' or 'to take part'. That verb was built from pars, meaning 'a part', and capere, meaning 'to take' or 'to seize', so the original sense was quite literal: to take a part of something. Latin formed the noun participatio for the act of sharing, and English took the word in through Old French participacion in the late 1300s. The same capere root that gives us the hidden -cip- in the middle also sits inside familiar words such as capture, capable, and recipe, all of which involve taking or holding. For the speller, the trap is that quiet middle: it is spelled with -cip-, mirroring the same syllable in participate, and the ending is the regular -ation, not -ition.

How the word is built

• part- (a part, from pars)
• -i-
• -cip- (from capere: to take)
• -ation (noun of action)