Vegetation

How to spell vegetation

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce vegetation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vegetation mean?

1. nounPlants considered collectively, especially those covering a particular area of ground.

Vegetation in a sentence

• Dense vegetation covered the riverbank and blocked the path.

• The survey mapped every type of vegetation across the national park.

Where does vegetation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb vegetare, meaning 'to enliven, to animate, or to quicken into growth', which itself grew from vegetus, an adjective meaning 'lively, vigorous, or full of energy', and ultimately from vegere, 'to be active'. Medieval Latin formed the noun vegetatio for the act of growing, and English borrowed the term in the late Middle Ages, at first to describe the process of growth and the power of living things to grow at all. Only later, around the eighteenth century, did it settle into its familiar modern sense of plant life considered collectively, the green covering of a landscape. The same lively Latin root still animates the related words 'vegetable' and 'vigour', and even 'vigil', all sharing the idea of being alert and full of life. A useful spelling hint is that the middle syllable is the ordinary word 'get', so the trap of writing 'vegitation' fades once you see veg-e-GET-ation, with that unstressed 'e' before the 't'.

How the word is built

• veget- (from Latin vegetare: to enliven, to grow)
• -ation (noun-forming suffix denoting a process or collective result)