Realisation

How to spell realisation

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce realisation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does realisation mean?

1. nounThe moment of suddenly understanding or becoming fully aware of something.
2. nounThe act of making something real, or of converting an asset or plan into concrete form.

Realisation in a sentence

• The sudden realisation that she had locked her keys inside ruined the morning.

• The realisation of the new headquarters took almost three years from design to opening.

• With growing realisation he saw that the figures in the report did not add up.

• The accountant advised delaying the realisation of the shares until the next tax year.

Where does realisation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on 'real', which descends from the Latin realis, meaning 'actual' or 'relating to things', itself from res, the Latin word for 'a thing' or 'a matter'. To this English added the verb-forming ending '-ise' to make 'realise', meaning both 'to make real' and 'to grasp as real in the mind', and then the noun-forming '-ation' to name the result or the act. The form arrived through French, where 'realiser' and the abstract noun in '-isation' were already in use during the 1600s, and English settled the noun by the early 1800s. Two quite different everyday meanings developed side by side: the mental one (suddenly understanding something) and the practical one (turning a plan or an asset into something concrete, including converting property into cash). The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the '-is-' that British writers keep where American writers use '-iz-', and the soft second 'a' of '-ation' that is easy to drop.

How the word is built

• real- (from Latin realis: actual, relating to things)
• -ise (verb-forming suffix)
• -ation (noun of action/state)

British and American spelling

Realisation is the British spelling. American English spells it realization.