Segregation

How to spell segregation

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce segregation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does segregation mean?

1. nounThe enforced separation of people into groups, especially by race, often backed by law or custom.
2. nounThe act of setting something apart or sorting it into distinct categories.

Segregation in a sentence

• The historian's lecture traced the slow legal end of racial segregation in schools.

• The recycling plant relies on careful segregation of glass, plastic, and paper.

• Campaigners marched for years to dismantle the system of segregation in public transport.

• Hospital policy requires the segregation of clean and contaminated equipment.

Where does segregation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb segregare, which meant 'to set apart from the flock'. It was built from se-, meaning 'apart' or 'away', and grex (stem greg-), meaning 'flock' or 'herd', so the literal image is of an animal separated out from the rest of the group. The same greg- root survives in the everyday words 'gregarious', describing someone fond of company, and 'congregation', a flock gathered together. English took the noun in during the early 1500s, first for the simple act of separating things, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had acquired its now-dominant social meaning of forcibly keeping racial or other groups apart. For spelling, it helps to remember the buried 'flock' word greg in the middle, which keeps the single g rather than a doubled one and explains the otherwise easily slurred middle syllable.

How the word is built

• se- (apart)
• greg (flock, herd)
• -ation (noun of action)