Samaritan

How to spell samaritan

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce samaritan

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does samaritan mean?

1. nounA person who unselfishly helps a stranger in difficulty, often in the phrase 'good samaritan'.

Samaritan in a sentence

• A passing samaritan stopped to change her flat tyre on the motorway.

• The injured cyclist was rescued by a samaritan who waited until the ambulance arrived.

Where does samaritan come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to Samaria, the name of an ancient region and city in the central highlands of the land of Israel. In Greek the inhabitants were called Samareitai, formed from the place name Samareia, which itself came through Hebrew Shomron, the name of the old capital. English took the term largely through the Latin Samaritanus of the Bible. Its modern, lower-case sense of a kind helper comes directly from the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke's Gospel, in which a traveller from Samaria stops to help an injured stranger whom others had ignored. Because Samaritans and Jews were historically at odds, the story's point was that compassion crossed those lines, and over centuries 'samaritan' drifted into everyday English as a byword for a selfless helper. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the 'a' before the 'r' is easy to drop or swap, and the single 't' before '-an' is often wrongly doubled.

How the word is built

• Samarit- (of Samaria, the region/people)
• -an (adjective/noun suffix: belonging to)