Sacrificial

How to spell sacrificial

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce sacrificial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sacrificial mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to a sacrifice, or offered up and given away for the sake of something else.

Sacrificial in a sentence

• The manager made a sacrificial decision to cut his own bonus before the layoffs.

• Ancient temples often contained a stone altar used for sacrificial offerings.

Where does sacrificial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This adjective traces back to the Latin sacrificium, meaning 'an offering to a god', which was built from two pieces: sacer, meaning 'sacred' or 'holy', and facere, meaning 'to make' or 'to do'. So the literal idea was 'the making of something sacred', the act of setting an offering apart for the divine. The noun 'sacrifice' came into English through Old French during the 1200s, and the adjective form 'sacrificial' followed later, describing anything relating to or offered as a sacrifice. Over time the sense widened beyond religious ritual to mean giving something up for the sake of a greater goal, as in a sacrificial gesture or a sacrificial play in sport. The same facere root sits inside a huge family of English words such as 'manufacture', 'benefit', and 'efficient', and recognising the 'fic' as the 'make' element helps explain why the middle of the word is spelled with that c.

How the word is built

• sacri- (sacred, from sacer)
• fic (make, from facere)
• -ial (adjective suffix)