Veterinary

How to spell veterinary

10 letters · 4 syllables

24 of the 59 people asked to spell veterinary in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is veteranary. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

veteranary veterinary

What people typed instead

• veteranary4 people
• veterenary3 people
• vetinary3 people

How to pronounce veterinary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does veterinary mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the medical treatment of animals or to the profession that provides it.

Veterinary in a sentence

• The puppy needed urgent veterinary care after swallowing a coin.

• She spent six years training before opening her own veterinary practice.

Where does veterinary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin veterinarius, meaning 'of or relating to beasts of burden', that is, the working cattle, oxen, and pack animals that needed regular doctoring. That adjective was built on veterinae, a collective term for draught animals, which many scholars connect to vetus, meaning 'old', perhaps because the older, sturdier animals were the ones put to heavy labour and so most often in need of care. English adopted the word in the mid 1600s to describe the medical treatment of animals, and by the 1790s 'veterinary surgeon' was an established profession. The modern shortening 'vet' hides the long middle of the full spelling, which is exactly where writers stumble: the unstressed 'er-in-a' sequence is easy to compress into the spoken 'vet-rin-ry', so a letter often goes missing on paper. Remembering the buried root veterinae, the working animals, helps fix all four of those quiet syllables.

How the word is built

• veterin- (from Latin veterinae: beasts of burden, working animals)
• -ary (relating to)

People who misspell veterinary also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got veterinary wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• connoisseur 100% of them got it wrong
• correspondent 73% of them got it wrong
• accommodations 60% of them got it wrong
• occurred 45% of them got it wrong
• entrepreneur 42% of them got it wrong
• embarrassing 40% of them got it wrong