Tolerance

How to spell tolerance

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tolerance

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tolerance mean?

1. nounA willingness to accept or permit opinions, behaviour, or people that differ from one's own.
2. nounThe permissible amount of variation in the dimension or measurement of a manufactured part.
3. nounThe body's capacity to endure a drug, substance, or condition, often requiring larger doses over time.

Tolerance in a sentence

• The company promotes tolerance of different cultural backgrounds among staff.

• Each component must be machined to a tolerance of half a millimetre.

• Patients can build a tolerance to painkillers after prolonged use.

• Religious tolerance allowed several faiths to worship in the same city.

• The engineer tightened the tolerance to ensure the parts fitted perfectly.

• Her tolerance for caffeine had grown so high that coffee no longer kept her awake.

Where does tolerance come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb tolerare, which literally meant 'to bear, to endure, or to put up with'. From it came the noun tolerantia, describing the act or capacity of enduring something difficult. English received the word in the 1400s through Old French tolerance, where it first carried the sense of physically enduring hardship, pain, or cold. Over the following centuries the meaning broadened from bodily endurance to the social idea of patiently allowing opinions and behaviours one disagrees with. The same Latin root survives in 'tolerate' and 'toleration', and the spelling trap lies in the unstressed final syllable, which sounds like a vague 'unce' yet is correctly written -ance rather than -ence.

How the word is built

• toler- (from Latin tolerare: to bear, endure)
• -ance (noun-forming suffix)