Vaccination

How to spell vaccination

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce vaccination

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vaccination mean?

1. nounThe act of administering a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease.

Vaccination in a sentence

• The clinic offers free flu vaccination every autumn.

• The nurse recorded the date of his measles vaccination in the file.

Where does vaccination come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin vacca, which simply meant 'cow'. The connection to medicine comes from Edward Jenner, the English physician who in the 1790s noticed that dairy workers who had caught cowpox seemed protected against the far deadlier smallpox. The mild cowpox disease was named vaccinia, from that same vacca root, because it came from cattle, and Jenner's deliberate use of it to build immunity was called vaccination. The word entered English around 1800, and Louis Pasteur later broadened its meaning to cover any protective inoculation in honour of Jenner's work. The doubled letter c is the spelling trap, and it survives precisely because the word literally carries 'cow' (vacca) inside it.

How the word is built

• vacc- (from Latin vacca: cow)
• -in- (relating to)
• -ation (noun of action)