Revolutionaries

How to spell revolutionaries

15 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce revolutionaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does revolutionaries mean?

1. nounPeople who work to bring about a complete overthrow of an established government or social order.

Revolutionaries in a sentence

• The history lecture focused on the young revolutionaries who toppled the old regime.

• A group of revolutionaries met in secret to plan the uprising.

Where does revolutionaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb volvere, meaning 'to roll' or 'to turn around', from which came volutio, the act of turning. Adding the prefix re-, meaning 'back' or 'again', produced the late Latin revolutio, literally 'a turning back' or 'a rolling round', a term first used in astronomy for the cyclical movement of heavenly bodies. English took 'revolution' through Old French in the 1300s, and only later did the political sense of a complete overturning of government take hold, sharpened by upheavals such as the French and American revolutions. The noun 'revolutionary', meaning a person who works to overthrow an established order, grew out of that political sense in the late eighteenth century. The spelling trap lies in the unstressed middle, the silent flow of '-volu-' and the '-tion-', plus the shift to '-aries' in the plural, where writers often drop a letter or muddle the ending.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• volut (from volvere: to roll/turn)
• -ion (noun of action)
• -ary (one connected with)
• -es (plural)