Sobriety

How to spell sobriety

8 letters · 4 syllables

1 of the 20 people asked to spell sobriety in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce sobriety

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sobriety mean?

1. nounThe state of being sober, especially abstaining from or not being affected by alcohol.
2. nounA quality of seriousness, calm restraint, or sober judgement.

Sobriety in a sentence

• After years of struggle, he marked ten years of sobriety.

• She addressed the grieving staff with quiet sobriety.

• The support group celebrated each member's continued sobriety.

• The report's sobriety reflected the gravity of the findings.

Where does sobriety come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin sobrietas, meaning the state of being sober, which was built on the adjective sobrius, 'not drunk'. That adjective is usually traced to a combination of the prefix se-, meaning 'without' or 'apart', and ebrius, meaning 'drunk' or 'intoxicated', so the literal sense was 'without drunkenness'. English took the word in the late 1300s by way of Old French sobriete, at first describing simple temperance with drink and later widening to mean seriousness and calm self-restraint of any kind. The same ebrius root lies behind 'inebriated', so a person who is inebriated is the exact opposite of one in a state of sobriety. The spelling trap is the quiet middle: the unstressed 'i' before '-ety' is easy to drop, and the ending is '-ety', not '-iety' spelled out as one might expect from speech.

How the word is built

• sobri- (from Latin sobrius: sober, not drunk)
• -ety (noun-forming suffix, state or quality of)