Predicament

How to spell predicament

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce predicament

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does predicament mean?

1. nounA difficult, unpleasant, or embarrassing situation that is hard to escape.

Predicament in a sentence

• Missing the last train left her in a real predicament that night.

• The company faced a financial predicament when two major clients withdrew.

Where does predicament come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Late Latin praedicamentum, which meant 'something asserted or declared', built from the verb praedicare, 'to proclaim or assert publicly'. That verb joined prae, meaning 'before' or 'forth', with dicare, 'to declare or make known', the same root that sits inside words like 'dictate' and 'predict'. In medieval philosophy the word was a precise technical term for one of Aristotle's logical categories, that is, a class into which a thing could be assigned. English took it up in the fifteenth century in that scholarly sense of 'category' or 'condition', and over time the everyday meaning drifted toward an awkward, troublesome condition or fix. Remembering that the middle of the word hides the same 'dic' that gives us 'predict' and 'dictionary' helps explain the spelling, since the trap is the unstressed 'a' in the third syllable, written -ica- rather than the sound a hurried writer might expect.

How the word is built

• prae- (before, forth)
• dic (to say, declare)
• -ament (noun-forming suffix)