Passionate
adjectiveShowing or driven by intense emotion, enthusiasm, or strong conviction.
How to spell passionate
10 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce passionate
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does passionate mean?
- adjectiveShowing or driven by intense emotion, enthusiasm, or strong conviction.
Passionate in a sentence
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She gave a passionate speech in favour of the new policy.
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He is a passionate supporter of local theatre and rarely misses a show.
Where does passionate come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This word grows out of the Latin verb pati, meaning 'to suffer' or 'to endure', whose past participle gave the noun passio, literally 'suffering'. In early Christian Latin passio described the suffering of Christ, which is why the events of Good Friday are still called the Passion, and from that root of intense feeling the sense widened to cover any overpowering emotion. Medieval Latin formed passionatus, 'filled with strong feeling', and English adopted passionate in the fifteenth century from this Latin source, partly by way of French. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the end: the doubled s is inherited directly from passio, and the final sound is the quiet, easy to misjudge -ate rather than -it. Knowing that passion sits whole inside the word, with -ate simply tacked on, keeps both the double s and the ending in place.
How the word is built
- passion (from Latin passio: suffering, strong feeling)
- -ate (adjective suffix)
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