Piety

How to spell piety

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce piety

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does piety mean?

1. nounDeep reverence for religion, or earnest devotion to a duty or belief.

Piety in a sentence

• Her quiet piety showed in the way she observed every fast and festival.

• The monastery was famous for the strict piety of its community.

Where does piety come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Piety comes from the Latin pietas, a noun meaning 'dutifulness', 'devotion', or 'a sense of duty toward gods, family, and country'. That noun was built on the adjective pius, which described a person who was dutiful and reverent, the same root that gives modern English 'pious'. The word travelled into English in the 1300s through Old French piete, and at that stage it carried a broad sense of compassion and dutiful tenderness. Interestingly, piety and the everyday word 'pity' are doublets: they spring from exactly the same Latin source but entered English by slightly different routes, with one keeping the religious flavour and the other narrowing to mean sympathy for suffering. The tricky spelling, with the 'ie' sitting before the '-ty' ending, is a relic of that Old French form, and remembering its kinship with 'pious' helps fix the order of those vowels.

How the word is built

• pi- (from Latin pius: dutiful, devout)
• -ety (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or quality)