Procedure

How to spell procedure

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce procedure

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does procedure mean?

1. nounAn established or official way of doing something, carried out as a fixed series of steps.

Procedure in a sentence

• The safety procedure must be followed before anyone enters the lab.

• The surgeon explained the procedure in detail before the operation.

Where does procedure come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Procedure comes from the Latin verb procedere, which literally meant 'to go forward' or 'to advance', built from pro- 'forward' and cedere 'to go or move'. English took the word through French procédure in the early 1600s, where it already described an established way of carrying out a course of action. The sense moved naturally from physically going forward to following a fixed series of steps, whether in law, medicine, or business. The very same cedere root sits inside relatives such as 'proceed', 'recede', and 'succeed', and that family connection is exactly the spelling trap: 'proceed' keeps its double e, but 'procedure' drops back to a single e, so writers who lean on 'proceed' often wrongly insert an extra e. Keeping the Latin root ced firmly in mind helps fix the single-e spelling.

How the word is built

• pro- (forward)
• ced (go, from Latin cedere)
• -ure (noun-forming suffix)