Toxicity

How to spell toxicity

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce toxicity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does toxicity mean?

1. nounThe degree to which a substance, or by extension a person or environment, is poisonous or harmful.

Toxicity in a sentence

• The lab measured the toxicity of the new pesticide before approval.

• Managers were warned about the toxicity of the office culture after the survey.

Where does toxicity come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the ancient Greek toxikon, which literally meant 'poison for arrows', a shortening of toxikon pharmakon, the drug smeared on arrowheads. That Greek word grew from toxon, meaning 'bow', so the very idea of poison was bound up with archery. Latin borrowed it as toxicum, simply 'poison', and the adjective 'toxic' reached English through French in the seventeenth century. The noun 'toxicity' was assembled later, in the nineteenth century, by adding the Latin-derived suffix -ity to 'toxic' to name the degree to which something is poisonous. A useful memory aid for the spelling is that the hard c sound in the middle is written with a single c plus i, giving the soft 'ss' sound, so the trap is the unstressed -ic-i- stretch rather than any doubled letter.

How the word is built

• tox- (from Greek toxikon: arrow poison)
• -ic (adjective base, 'toxic')
• -ity (noun suffix: state or quality)