Severance

How to spell severance

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce severance

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does severance mean?

1. nounMoney paid to an employee when their job is ended, often calculated from length of service.
2. nounThe act of cutting, breaking, or ending a connection between things.

Severance in a sentence

• The company offered three months of severance to every redundant worker.

• The treaty marked a clean severance of the two former allies.

• Her severance package included pay, benefits, and career counselling.

• The storm caused a complete severance of power to the village.

Where does severance come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word travels back to the Latin verb separare, meaning literally 'to pull apart' or 'to set aside', formed from se- 'apart' and parare 'to prepare or arrange'. In the spoken Latin of late antiquity the verb worn down into a form that gave Old French sevrer, 'to separate or wean', and from that came the Anglo-French noun severance, recording the act of cutting or breaking apart. English adopted it in the 1400s, at first for the literal cutting of physical things and the legal dividing of property and rights. Over time it gathered its modern office meaning: the ending of an employment relationship and the payment that softens that break, since the job link is, in effect, severed. The same Latin root survives in the everyday relatives 'separate' and 'sever', and noticing that 'sever' sits whole inside the word, followed by the plain -ance ending, is the easiest way to keep the spelling straight.

How the word is built

• sever (from Latin separare: to separate)
• -ance (noun suffix denoting an action or state)