Solidarity

How to spell solidarity

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce solidarity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does solidarity mean?

1. nounUnity and mutual support among a group of people who share interests, feelings, or goals.

Solidarity in a sentence

• The workers marched in solidarity with the striking miners.

• Neighbours showed real solidarity after the flood by sharing food and tools.

Where does solidarity come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the middle of the nineteenth century from the French solidarité, a term that French legal and political writers used for a shared, mutual responsibility. Behind the French lies the Latin solidus, which literally meant 'solid', 'whole', or 'undivided', the same root that gives us 'solid' itself. In Roman law a debt held in solidum was one for which each party was liable for the whole amount, so the idea of people bound together as one was baked into the word from the start. From that legal sense it broadened into the social and emotional meaning we use today: a feeling of unity and common cause among a group. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle, where the schwa vowels in 'sol-i-DAR-i-ty' give no clue that they are written with i, and in remembering it grows from the familiar 'solid'.

How the word is built

• solid- (from Latin solidus: whole, firm)
• -ar- (relating to)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)