Pregnancies

How to spell pregnancies

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pregnancies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pregnancies mean?

1. nounMore than one instance of the condition of carrying a developing baby in the womb.

Pregnancies in a sentence

• The midwife had supported hundreds of pregnancies over her long career.

• The study compared health outcomes across first and later pregnancies.

Where does pregnancies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin praegnans, meaning 'with child' or literally 'before birth', formed from the prefix prae- ('before') and a root related to gnasci, 'to be born'. The same gn- birth root sits inside familiar words such as 'native', 'nature', and 'genesis', all of which circle around the idea of coming into being. English took 'pregnant' into use in the 1400s, and the noun 'pregnancy' was built from it later by adding the -ancy ending that turns a quality into a state. The plural 'pregnancies' follows the ordinary English rule that a final consonant plus -y becomes -ies. The spelling trap for adults is the buried, almost silent g and the swap from -cy to -cies, since neither change is signalled by the sound.

How the word is built

• pre- (before)
• gn- (from gnasci: to be born)
• -ant (adjective)
• -cy (noun)
• -ies (plural of -y)