Visualization

How to spell visualization

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce visualization

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visualization mean?

1. nounThe act of forming a mental picture of something, or of presenting information in a visible, graphic form.

Visualization in a sentence

• The coach taught the athletes a visualization technique to rehearse each race in their minds.

• The analyst built a clear visualization of the sales figures so the board could grasp the trend.

Where does visualization come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on the Latin verb videre, meaning 'to see', whose past participle visus gave the late Latin adjective visualis, 'relating to sight'. English took up 'visual' from that source in the late Middle Ages, and centuries later writers attached the Greek-derived verb ending -ize to make 'visualize', meaning to form a mental picture of something. Adding the Latin noun ending -ation then produced 'visualization', the act or result of picturing something in the mind or rendering it in visible form. The term gained real traction in the nineteenth century, first in psychology for mental imagery and later in science and computing for turning data into pictures. The same videre root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'vision', 'video' and 'evident', and the tricky stretch to remember when spelling it is the unstressed '-ualiza-' run in the middle, where several vowels collapse into faint schwa sounds.

How the word is built

• vis- (from Latin videre, to see)
• -ual (adjective)
• -ize (verb-forming)
• -ation (noun of action)

British and American spelling

Visualization is the American spelling. British English spells it visualisation.