Syllable division derived from spelling — this word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so no phonetic transcription is shown rather than a guessed one.
sustentation is a noun meaning "the act of sustaining life by food or providing a means of subsistence". It carries one recorded sense.
the act of sustaining life by food or providing a means of subsistence
“they were in want of sustenance”
“fishing was their main sustainment”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for sustentation come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.