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How to spell personification

hear itper·son·i·fi·ca·tion/pər,sɑnɪfɪ'keɪʃən/nounAcademic

What it means: Attributing human traits to non-human things.

In a sentence: The cartoon showed personification by giving the sun a happy face and a voice.

The part people get wrong

Watch for an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear. Often misspelled as personafication or personfication.

Same family: person, personified, personifying, metaphor, figurative. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: “Personification” comes from the Latin word “persona,” meaning “mask” or “character in a play,” combined with a suffix that turns it into a noun. It literally developed from the idea of giving a non-human thing a human ‘mask’ or role.

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

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