How to spell addition

hear itad·di·tion/ə'dɪʃən/nounSilent and tricky

What it means: The arithmetic operation of summing numbers.

In a sentence: I learned addition in math class today.

The part people get wrong

Watch for double d, and an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear. Often misspelled as adition or additon.

Same family: added, adding, additional, additionally, addition/subtraction. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: “Addition” comes from Latin *additio*, meaning “a adding to,” from *addere* (“to give to” or “to add”). It has been used in English for both everyday ‘extra things’ and the mathematical operation since the Middle Ages.

Patterns it uses: The unstressed vowel (schwa) · -tion, -sion or -cian?

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Words like this

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