- Today's Word
Tantamount
TAN-tuh-mownt
Definition
(adjective) Equivalent in seriousness, effect, or value to something else; virtually the same as another thing in consequence.
Example
Leaving during the final vote was tantamount to admitting she had already given up.
Word Origin
From Anglo-French tant amunter — “to amount to as much,” from tant (“so much,” from Latin tantus) + amunter (“to amount”). The phrase entered English in the 17th century, originally used in legal and diplomatic contexts where equivalence had to be precisely established. It gradually shifted from technical legal language into general use.
Fun Fact
“Tantamount” is one of those words that’s almost always followed by “to” — you can’t really use it without completing the comparison. This grammatical dependency is unusual, and it gives the word a particular rhetorical force: it locks two things together in equivalence, insisting on their sameness even when they look different on the surface. Lawyers, politicians, and editorial writers disproportionately favor it because it makes a strong claim in a single word — collapsing a complex comparison into something blunt and decisive.