Substitution

How to spell substitution

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce substitution

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does substitution mean?

1. nounThe act of replacing one person or thing with another, or the replacement itself.

Substitution in a sentence

• The recipe suggests a substitution of olive oil for butter.

• The coach made an early substitution when the striker was injured.

Where does substitution come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb substituere, which meant 'to put in place of another'. It was formed from the prefix sub-, here carrying the sense of 'instead of' or 'under', joined to statuere, meaning 'to set up' or 'to place', itself a relative of stare, 'to stand'. The Latin noun substitutio described the act of putting one thing where another had been, and English took the word in through Old French during the late medieval period, with the modern spelling settling by the 1400s. The same statuere root surfaces in a whole family of English words such as statute, constitution, and institute, all sharing the idea of something being set or established. The spelling trap lies in the unstressed middle: the 'stitut' chunk echoes 'statute', and remembering the 'set, place' root helps fix the two t's and the single s after the 'sub'.

How the word is built

• sub- (in place of)
• stitut (from Latin statuere: to set, place)
• -ion (noun of action)