Specimen

How to spell specimen

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce specimen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does specimen mean?

1. nounA single example of something, especially one taken or shown for study, testing, or display.

Specimen in a sentence

• The lab asked the patient to provide a urine specimen before the appointment.

• The museum displayed a rare beetle specimen pinned inside a glass case.

Where does specimen come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes directly from the Latin specimen, which meant a 'mark, token, or example', and more literally something offered up so that it could be looked at and judged. It was built on the verb specere, meaning 'to look at' or 'to observe', the same root that sits inside 'inspect', 'spectator', and 'spectacle'. When English adopted the word in the early seventeenth century, it carried the sense of a sample that stands as proof or evidence of a larger whole, exactly as a single rock might represent a quarry. Over time scientists fastened on it for individual examples gathered for study, whether a plant, an insect, or a sample of blood. The spelling trap lies in the quiet middle: the unstressed second vowel is an 'i', not the 'a' that the schwa sound tempts writers toward, and the ending is '-men', not '-man'.

How the word is built

• spec- (from specere: to look at)
• -i- (connecting vowel)
• -men (noun suffix denoting a result or thing)