Recommendation

How to spell recommendation

14 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce recommendation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recommendation mean?

1. nounA suggestion or proposal that something is good, suitable, or worth doing, often offered as advice or endorsement.

Recommendation in a sentence

• The consultant included a clear recommendation to upgrade the servers.

• Her former manager wrote a glowing recommendation for the job application.

Where does recommendation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb commendare, meaning 'to commit, entrust, or praise', which was built from the intensive prefix com- and the verb mandare, 'to put into someone's hand, to entrust'. That mandare itself combined manus 'hand' with dare 'to give', so the underlying picture is of placing something trustingly into another person's hand. In Medieval Latin a further prefix produced recommendare, and the sense settled on speaking well of someone or something to another party. English took the verb 'recommend' through Old French in the late 1300s, and the noun 'recommendation' followed, describing the act of praising or advising in someone's favour. The trickiest part of the spelling is that it carries a single c but a doubled m, the reverse of what many writers expect, and the same mandare root survives in the related words 'mandate' and 'command'.

How the word is built

• re- (intensive prefix)
• com- (with/together)
• mend (from Latin mandare: to entrust, commit)
• -ation (noun suffix)