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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 among the exceptions. And a few tenēre words don't follow the usual pattern: tenacious and tenure are two.
Examples of pertain in a Sentence
Mike Nolan, Chicago Tribune, 7 May 2024
The most audacious of these was a finite-field version of the Riemann hypothesis, one of the most important open questions in mathematics, which pertains to, among other things, how prime numbers are distributed.
—Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 6 May 2024
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“Pertain.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pertain. Accessed 15 May. 2024.
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pertain
verb
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