Utilities

How to spell utilities

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce utilities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does utilities mean?

1. nounEssential public services such as water, gas, and electricity, or the companies that supply them.
2. nounSmall programs that perform specific maintenance or support tasks on a computer.

Utilities in a sentence

• The rent covers heating but not the utilities.

• The operating system includes utilities for backing up and cleaning files.

• Monthly spending on utilities rose sharply over the winter.

• He downloaded several disk utilities to recover the corrupted drive.

Where does utilities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin utilitas, meaning 'usefulness' or 'benefit', which was built on the adjective utilis, 'useful', from the verb uti, 'to use'. English took the singular 'utility' from Old French utilite in the late 1300s, where it carried the broad sense of being useful or advantageous. Over the centuries the meaning narrowed in a practical direction: by the 1800s 'utility' came to describe a public service such as water, gas, or electricity, the kind of thing that is plainly useful to everyone, and the plural 'utilities' became the everyday term for those services and the companies that supply them. The same uti root sits inside familiar relatives like 'use', 'utensil', and 'utilise'. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle vowel in '-ity', which sounds like a vague 'uh' yet must be written as an i.

How the word is built

• util- (from Latin utilis: useful)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)
• -es (plural)