Psychological

How to spell psychological

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce psychological

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does psychological mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the mind, mental processes, or the scientific study of behaviour.

Psychological in a sentence

• The therapist explained the psychological effects of long-term stress.

• Losing the contract dealt the founder a serious psychological blow.

Where does psychological come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reaches back to the Greek psyche, which originally meant 'breath' and then came to mean the soul, spirit, or mind, joined to logos, meaning 'word', 'reason', or 'study'. Scholars in the Renaissance assembled the Latinised form psychologia to name the study of the mind, and it surfaces in academic writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The adjective 'psychological' followed naturally, describing anything relating to that study or to the workings of the mind, and it became common in English during the nineteenth century as psychology matured into a recognised science. The same psyche root gives us 'psyche', 'psychiatry', and 'psychic', while the logos element appears in countless study words such as 'biology' and 'geology'. The spelling trap lies right at the front: the silent 'p' before the 's', and the 'ch' sounding like a hard 'k', both faithful echoes of the original Greek that no longer match how the word is pronounced.

How the word is built

• psycho- (from Greek psyche: breath, soul, mind)
• -log- (from logos: word, study, account)
• -ical (adjective suffix)