Ubiquitous

How to spell ubiquitous

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce ubiquitous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ubiquitous mean?

1. adjectivePresent, appearing, or found everywhere at the same time.

Ubiquitous in a sentence

• Smartphones have become so ubiquitous that few people remember life without them.

• The coffee chain is now ubiquitous on almost every high street in the country.

Where does ubiquitous come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin ubique, meaning 'everywhere', which was itself built from ubi, meaning 'where', combined with the generalising particle -que. In the late 1500s and 1600s, theologians coined the Latin abstract noun ubiquitas to describe the doctrine that Christ's body could be present everywhere at once, and from that learned context the adjective ubiquitous emerged in English in the early 1800s. Its meaning quickly broadened from a religious idea of omnipresence to the everyday sense of something found absolutely everywhere, such as a brand, a gadget, or a phrase. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unstressed '-qui-' is pronounced 'kwi' and the ending is '-tous', not '-tious', because it grew from ubique rather than from any word ending in '-tion'. A useful memory hook is that the same ubi 'where' root underlies the slightly archaic English word 'ubiety', meaning the property of being in a particular place.

How the word is built

• ubiqu- (from Latin ubique: everywhere, from ubi 'where')
• -it- (linking)
• -ous (adjective suffix: full of, characterised by)