Saturation

How to spell saturation

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce saturation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does saturation mean?

1. nounThe state of being completely filled, soaked, or unable to absorb or hold any more.
2. nounThe intensity or purity of a colour in an image or on a screen.

Saturation in a sentence

• The soil reached complete saturation after three days of heavy rain.

• She increased the saturation to make the sunset photo look more vivid.

• Market saturation meant the company could no longer find new customers.

• Lowering the saturation gave the portrait a muted, faded tone.

Where does saturation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb saturare, meaning 'to fill' or 'to glut', which was built on the adjective satur, meaning 'full' or 'well fed'. The same satur root sits behind the everyday word 'satisfy' and the rarer 'satiate', all sharing the idea of having had enough. English took 'saturate' as a verb in the sixteenth century, and the noun 'saturation' followed to name the state of being completely filled or soaked. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from literal wetness into technical fields: chemists use it for a solution that can dissolve no more, and the language of colour and imaging uses it for the intensity of a hue. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle, since the '-tur-' is pronounced like a soft 'cher' yet must be written with a 't', and the ending is the reliable '-ation', not '-ition'.

How the word is built

• satur- (from Latin satur: full, sated)
• -ation (noun suffix forming a state or process)