Urinary

How to spell urinary

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce urinary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does urinary mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to urine or to the organs that produce and carry it.

Urinary in a sentence

• The doctor ordered tests to rule out a urinary tract infection.

• Persistent urinary symptoms led her to book an appointment with a specialist.

Where does urinary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin urina, the ordinary word for urine, which is itself thought to be related to the Greek ouron of the same meaning and, more distantly, to an ancient root meaning 'water' or 'to moisten'. From urina the Latins formed the adjective urinarius, 'relating to urine', and English took this over in the late 1500s when medical and anatomical writing was expanding rapidly. The ending -ary, very common in technical adjectives such as 'salivary' and 'coronary', simply signals 'pertaining to'. The spelling trap is the quiet middle vowel: writers know the prefix 'urin-' but often hesitate over whether it ends in -ary, -ery, or -ory, and the unstressed syllable gives no clue by ear. Keeping the link to urine in mind anchors the 'urin' part firmly.

How the word is built

• urin- (from Latin urina: urine)
• -ary (adjective suffix meaning 'relating to')