Seminal

How to spell seminal

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce seminal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seminal mean?

1. adjectiveStrongly influential in the later development of something; containing the origins of important later work.

Seminal in a sentence

• Her seminal paper on genetics reshaped the entire field.

• The album is considered a seminal influence on modern rock.

Where does seminal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin seminalis, meaning 'of or belonging to seed', which was built on semen, the ordinary Latin word for a seed or the act of sowing. The same semen root literally meant 'that which is sown', and it survives in English in both the reproductive sense and in words such as 'disseminate', meaning to scatter seeds or ideas widely. English borrowed seminal in the late 1300s, at first in the strictly biological sense of relating to seed or semen. Over time the agricultural image of a planted seed that grows into something larger was applied to ideas, so by the eighteenth century a seminal work meant one that contained the seeds of later developments and was therefore highly influential. The spelling stays close to its Latin source, and remembering the buried word 'semen' (seed) explains both the single m and the i in the middle.

How the word is built

• semin- (from Latin semen: seed)
• -al (adjective suffix)