Realities

How to spell realities

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce realities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does realities mean?

1. nounThe actual facts or conditions of a situation, especially as contrasted with hopes, plans or appearances.

Realities in a sentence

• The budget forced the team to confront the harsh financial realities of the project.

• Glossy brochures rarely match the everyday realities of life in a new city.

Where does realities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'reality', which traces back to the Latin noun 'res', meaning simply 'thing' or 'matter'. From 'res' came the medieval Latin adjective 'realis', meaning 'actual' or 'relating to things', and from that the late Latin abstract noun 'realitas', the quality of being real. English took the word in through Old French and Anglo-Latin during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, first in legal and philosophical writing about what truly exists as opposed to what is merely imagined. The same 'res' root survives in everyday words such as 'real', 'realise' and even 'republic' (from 'res publica', the public thing). The spelling trap in the plural is the soft unstressed middle, where 'real' plus '-ity' becomes 'reali-' before the '-ties' ending, so the 'a' and the single 'l' are easy to mishandle.

How the word is built

• real (from Latin realis: actual, relating to things)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix: state or quality)
• -es (plural, with y changing to i)