Seasonal

How to spell seasonal

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce seasonal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seasonal mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to, occurring in, or varying with a particular season or time of year.

Seasonal in a sentence

• The shop hires extra staff to cover the seasonal rush before the holidays.

• Hay fever is a seasonal problem that flares up every spring.

Where does seasonal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on 'season', which English took from the Old French 'seison' in the 1200s, itself descended from the Latin 'satio', meaning 'a sowing' or 'a planting'. The Latin noun came from the verb 'serere', 'to sow', so the earliest idea was the proper time for putting seeds in the ground, which then broadened to mean any of the natural divisions of the year. The adjective 'seasonal' is a later English formation, joining the noun to the common suffix '-al' that turns a thing into a describing word, and it became common in the nineteenth century to mean 'relating to or varying with the seasons'. A useful relative is 'seasoned' in the cookery sense, since flavouring food and ripening with time both trace back to the same notion of bringing something to its right state at the right moment. The spelling trap is the quiet middle: a single 's' for the /z/ sound, then '-onal' rather than the tempting '-onel' or '-anal'.

How the word is built

• season (from Latin satio: a sowing, planting time)
• -al (adjective suffix)