Visionary

How to spell visionary

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce visionary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visionary mean?

1. adjectiveShowing original and imaginative thinking about what the future could be.
2. nounA person with original ideas about what the future will or could be like.

Visionary in a sentence

• adjective

  The founder had a visionary plan to redesign the entire transport network.

• noun

  He was hailed as a visionary who reshaped the music industry.

• adjective

  Critics praised the architect for her visionary approach to sustainable housing.

• noun

  Every great visionary faces doubters before the idea catches on.

Where does visionary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb videre, meaning 'to see', which gave rise to visio, the act of seeing or a thing seen. From visio English already had 'vision', and during the early 1600s writers added the Latin-derived ending -ary to form 'visionary'. At first it carried a slightly suspicious flavour, describing someone given to seeing things that were not really there, in other words a dreamer or someone prone to fanciful visions. Over the following centuries the sense brightened, so that today a visionary is admired for imagining a future others cannot yet picture. The same videre root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'visible', 'evident', and 'supervise', and the spelling trap is the unstressed ending: it is -ary (from Latin -arius), not -ery.

How the word is built

• vis- (root from Latin videre 'to see')
• -ion (noun-forming)
• -ary (adjective/noun suffix)