Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

mutual

UK/ˈmjuːt͡ʃuəl/
adjectiveB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,000 of 15,258leans written

Mutual means felt or done by each side towards the other. Mutual respect, the feeling is mutual, mutual agreement.

Strictly it needs two parties acting on each other, so a mutual friend is loose usage that purists once fought and everybody now accepts — Dickens put it in a title. A mutual company is one owned by its customers. The Latin mutuus means reciprocal.

Definitions of mutual

  1. 1adjectivemutualFelt or done by each side towards the other.B2

    “They didn't like each other, and the feeling was mutual.”

mutual is a quality of reciprocity.

Where it comes from

Latin mutuus means borrowed or reciprocal, from mutare, to change or exchange.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *mey- (change)

  2. Latin

    mūtuus

  3. Middle French

    mutuel

  4. English, today

    mutual

Borrowed from Middle French mutuel, from Latin mūtuus. Displaced native Old English ġemǣne.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

mutual in the wild

  • A mutual fund is technically a mutual organization.

    Mutual fund

  • MI is the expected value of the pointwise mutual information (PMI).

    Mutual information

  • Several mutual funds managed by Vanguard are ranked at the top of the list of mutual funds in the United States by assets under management.

    The Vanguard Group

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.