Serial

How to spell serial

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce serial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does serial mean?

1. adjectiveArranged in or happening as a connected series, one after another.
2. nounA story or programme published or broadcast in separate consecutive instalments.

Serial in a sentence

• adjective

  The police were hunting a serial offender who struck in three counties.

• noun

  The radio serial ran for twelve weekly episodes.

• adjective

  Every laptop carries a unique serial number on its base.

• noun

  She wrote a detective serial for the Sunday newspaper.

Where does serial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin series, meaning 'a row' or 'a connected line of things', which itself derives from the verb serere, 'to join, link, or weave together'. English speakers built 'serial' in the early 1800s by adding the adjective ending -al to that root, originally describing things that appear in a regular succession or series, especially stories printed in consecutive parts of a magazine. From that publishing sense it broadened to mean anything happening one after another in a sequence, including the modern senses of serial numbers and serial killers. The same series root sits inside the everyday word 'series' itself, which is the key to the spelling: keep the 'seri-' from series and simply add '-al'. It is the homophone with breakfast 'cereal' (named after the Roman grain goddess Ceres) that causes most of the trouble, since the two words sound identical but share no history at all.

How the word is built

• seri- (from Latin series: a row, a connected sequence)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)

Words that sound like serial

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• cereal: A breakfast food made from processed grain, usually eaten with milk.