Relegation

How to spell relegation

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce relegation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does relegation mean?

1. nounThe act of moving someone or something to a lower or less important position, especially a sports team dropping to a lower division.

Relegation in a sentence

• The club narrowly avoided relegation on the final day of the season.

• Another defeat would almost certainly mean relegation to the second tier.

Where does relegation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb relegare, which literally meant 'to send away' or 'to banish', formed from the prefix re- 'back, away' and legare 'to send, to depute or appoint as an envoy'. In Roman law relegatio was a milder form of exile in which a citizen was ordered to leave the city without losing all rights, so the original flavour was one of being formally consigned somewhere lower or further off. English took the noun in around the early 1600s, keeping the sense of pushing something or someone down to an inferior position. The same legare root sits behind the everyday words 'legate', 'delegate' and 'legacy', all of which share the idea of sending or entrusting. In modern British usage the football sense, dropping to a lower division, is by far the most familiar, and the spelling stays faithful to its Latin parent with the single 'l' and the 'g' that maps onto that buried leg root.

How the word is built

• re- (back, away)
• leg (from legare: to send, depute)
• -ation (noun of action)