Spherical

How to spell spherical

9 letters · 3 syllables

1 of the 55 people asked to spell spherical in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce spherical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spherical mean?

1. adjectiveShaped like a sphere; perfectly round in three dimensions.

Spherical in a sentence

• The planet is not perfectly spherical, since it bulges slightly at the equator.

• The factory polished each bearing into a precise spherical form.

Where does spherical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek sphaira, which simply meant 'ball' or 'globe', the very object the geometric sphere is modelled on. The Greeks formed the adjective sphairikos, 'shaped like a ball', and Latin took this up as sphaericus. English acquired the word in the late 1500s, partly through French sphérique, at a time when astronomers and mathematicians were busily describing the heavens and the earth as perfect globes. The same sphaira root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'sphere', 'hemisphere', and 'atmosphere', and it explains the spelling trap: the silent 'ph' spells the Greek 'f' sound, so writers must remember to write 'sph' rather than the phonetic 'sf'.

How the word is built

• spher- (from Greek sphaira: ball, globe)
• -ic (relating to)
• -al (adjective suffix)