Terminate

How to spell terminate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce terminate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does terminate mean?

1. verbTo bring something to an end, or to cause it to stop.
2. verbTo dismiss someone from their employment.

Terminate in a sentence

• The council voted to terminate the lease early.

• The firm decided to terminate two managers after the merger.

• A power cut can terminate a long download in seconds.

• Repeated lateness gave them grounds to terminate the new hire.

Where does terminate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb terminare, meaning 'to set a boundary' or 'to bring to a limit', which was built directly on the noun terminus, the Latin word for a boundary marker, border, or end point. The Romans even worshipped a minor god called Terminus, who guarded the stone markers that defined property boundaries, so the original flavour of the root was very physical: the edge where one thing stopped and another began. English took the verb in during the late 1500s, by which time the sense had broadened from marking a physical limit to bringing any process, period, or contract to a close. The same terminus root still surfaces in everyday words such as 'terminal' (the end of a railway or air route) and 'term' (a fixed period with a defined end). Keeping that meaning in mind helps with the spelling: the heart of the word is termin (the end), and the action is added with the plain -ate ending, with the tricky unstressed middle vowel written as an i.

How the word is built

• termin- (from Latin terminus: boundary, limit, end)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)