Word
Of
The
Day
pertain
pertain \per-TAYN\
verb
To pertain to someone or something is to relate, refer, or have a connection to that person or thing.
// That law
pertains only to people who live in this state.
See the entry >
Examples:
"There are certain rules of conduct that
pertain to office dressing no matter how lax your HR department may be. No shirt, no shoes, no job. But keeping it professional doesn’t have to mean feeling stuffy or boring ..." — Aemilia Madden,
The Cut, 20 Nov. 2024
Did you know?
Pertain comes to English via Anglo-French from the Latin verb
pertinēre, meaning "to reach to" or "to belong."
Pertinēre, in turn, was formed by combining the prefix
per- (meaning "through") and
tenēre ("to hold").
Tenēre is a popular root in English words and often manifests with the
-tain spelling that can be seen in
pertain. Other descendants include
abstain,
contain,
detain,
maintain,
obtain,
retain, and
sustain, to name a few of the more common ones. Not every
-tain word has
tenēre in its ancestry, though.
Ascertain,
attain, and
certain are certainly exceptions. And a few
tenēre words don't follow the usual pattern:
tenacious and
tenure are two.