Subcommittee

How to spell subcommittee

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce subcommittee

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does subcommittee mean?

1. nounA smaller group appointed from within a larger committee to handle a specific area of work.

Subcommittee in a sentence

• The finance subcommittee will review the budget before the full board meets.

• Three members were asked to join the planning subcommittee for the new building.

Where does subcommittee come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word joins the Latin prefix sub-, meaning 'under' or 'below', to 'committee', and so literally names a group working under a larger body. 'Committee' itself grew out of the verb 'commit', which came through Anglo-French from the Latin committere, meaning 'to entrust' or 'to bring together'; a committee was originally a person or persons to whom a matter was entrusted. By the seventeenth century English used 'committee' for an appointed body, and 'subcommittee' followed naturally for a smaller panel delegated a portion of that body's work. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the end: the prefix 'sub' butts straight up against 'committee', and 'committee' keeps a doubled m and a doubled t plus the unusual double e. Remembering that it is simply 'sub' plus the whole word 'committee', spelled in full, is the surest way to get every letter right.

How the word is built

• sub- (under, subordinate)
• committee (from commit
• -ee), a smaller group set up under a larger one