Slavic

How to spell slavic

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce slavic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does slavic mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the Slavs, a group of peoples of central and eastern Europe, or to their languages and culture.
2. nounThe branch of the Indo-European language family that includes Russian, Polish, Czech, and related tongues.

Slavic in a sentence

• adjective

  The museum displayed ancient slavic pottery recovered from the river valley.

• noun

  Her doctorate focused on the historical grammar of common slavic.

• adjective

  Many slavic languages are written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

• noun

  The linguistics department offers a full degree in slavic.

Where does slavic come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word traces back to the name the Slavic peoples gave themselves, recorded in early forms such as Slovene or Slověne, which some scholars connect to a root meaning 'word' or 'speech', so that the Slavs were 'the people who speak intelligibly' among themselves. The name passed into Byzantine Greek as Sklabos and into Medieval Latin as Sclavus, and from there spread across the languages of Europe. English picked up 'Slav' and built the adjective 'Slavic' with the familiar Latin suffix -ic, meaning 'pertaining to', a process that became common from around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as European scholars grouped these related peoples and tongues. A striking and uncomfortable twist is that the English word 'slave' grows from the very same Latin Sclavus, because so many Slavic people were captured and sold during the early medieval period that their name became the general term for an enslaved person. Knowing that 'slave' and 'Slavic' share one root can actually help fix the spelling, since both keep the simple 'slav' core with no hidden letters.

How the word is built

• Slav (the ethnic name, from the peoples' own self-designation)
• -ic (adjective-forming suffix meaning 'relating to')