Relatable

How to spell relatable

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce relatable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does relatable mean?

1. adjectiveEasy to identify with or understand because it reflects one's own experience.

Relatable in a sentence

• The manager told a relatable story about missing a train to work.

• Viewers liked the show because its characters felt genuinely relatable.

Where does relatable come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on the verb 'relate', which comes from the Latin relatus, the past participle of referre, meaning 'to carry back' or 'to bring back', formed from re- 'back' and ferre 'to carry'. In Latin the idea of carrying something back came to mean reporting or recounting an event, and that storytelling sense passed into English through French in the 1500s, so that to 'relate' a tale meant to tell it. From there English developed the looser sense of one thing standing in connection with another, and adding the productive suffix -able produced 'relatable', meaning capable of being connected with. The modern emotional sense, describing a person or experience that ordinary people can identify with, is surprisingly recent and only became common in the late twentieth century. Note that the spelling keeps the full 'relate' before the suffix, so the silent final 'e' is dropped and the trap is remembering the single 't' and the -able rather than -ible ending.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• lat (carried, from Latin latus, the past participle of ferre 'to carry')
• -able (capable of being)