Transplantation

How to spell transplantation

15 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce transplantation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does transplantation mean?

1. nounThe surgical transfer of an organ or living tissue from one body, or part of a body, to another.
2. nounThe act of lifting a growing plant from one location and resettling it in another.

Transplantation in a sentence

• The patient was placed on the waiting list for a kidney transplantation.

• The seedlings need careful transplantation once they outgrow their trays.

• Advances in heart transplantation have greatly improved survival rates.

• The gardener timed the transplantation of the roses for early autumn.

Where does transplantation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb transplantare, formed from trans, meaning 'across' or 'from one place to another', and plantare, meaning 'to plant' or 'to set in the ground'. In its earliest life the word was thoroughly agricultural: it described digging up a seedling and resettling it in fresh soil. The noun form transplantation entered English in the seventeenth century by way of the Latin and French abstract noun, keeping that literal sense of moving a growing thing to a new home. Over time the meaning widened from the garden to the human body, so that by the modern era it described the surgical relocation of living tissue and organs from one body, or one part of a body, to another. The buried word 'plant' is the key to the spelling: remembering trans + plant + ation keeps the awkward middle from collapsing.

How the word is built

• trans- (across, from one place to another)
• plant (from Latin plantare, to plant or set in the ground)
• -ation (noun suffix denoting an action or process)