Personality

How to spell personality

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce personality

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does personality mean?

1. nounThe combination of qualities and traits that forms a person's distinctive character.
2. nounA well-known or famous person, especially a celebrity in entertainment or media.

Personality in a sentence

• Her warm personality made her popular with new colleagues.

• The charity gala attracted a television personality and several athletes.

• The interview tested skills as well as personality and attitude.

• He became a radio personality after years of local broadcasting.

Where does personality come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin persona, which originally meant the mask an actor wore on stage and, by extension, the character that mask represented. From persona Latin built the adjective personalis, meaning 'belonging to a person', and the medieval Latin noun personalitas was coined to describe the quality of being a person. English took it in through Old French and Anglo-Norman around the fifteenth century, at first in fairly abstract and legal or theological senses. Only later, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did it settle into the familiar modern meaning of the distinctive blend of qualities that makes someone who they are. The same persona root still surfaces in 'person', 'personnel', and the modern word 'persona' itself, and the long spelling simply stacks two suffixes onto that root, which is what makes the unstressed middle vowels easy to slip on.

How the word is built

• person (from persona: a character or role)
• -al (adjective suffix)
• -ity (noun suffix forming a quality)