Personalities

How to spell personalities

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce personalities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does personalities mean?

1. nounThe combinations of qualities, traits, and behaviours that make individuals distinct from one another.
2. nounWell known people, especially those who are famous through television, radio, or other media.

Personalities in a sentence

• The two brothers have very different personalities, though they look alike.

• Several television personalities attended the charity gala.

• A good manager learns to balance the strong personalities on the team.

• The magazine ran profiles of sporting personalities from the past decade.

Where does personalities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin persona, which originally named the mask an actor wore on stage and then came to mean the character or role that mask represented. From persona came the medieval Latin personalitas, meaning the quality of being a person, and that abstract noun passed through Old French into English in the late 1300s. For a long time the singular 'personality' meant simply the state of being a person, but by the eighteenth century it had narrowed to the distinctive set of traits that make someone who they are. A second, newer sense, a famous or notable person, grew up in the twentieth century as broadcasting created public figures. The plural keeps the full chain of suffixes intact, and remembering the buried -al- before -ity is the key to spelling it, since the unstressed middle syllables are easy to slur over.

How the word is built

• person (from persona: a mask, character)
• -al (adjective)
• -ity (noun: state or quality)
• -es (plural)