Advert

How to spell advert

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce advert

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does advert mean?

1. nounA public notice or short promotion for a product, service, or event; an advertisement.

Advert in a sentence

• The advert for the new phone played before every video.

• She spotted the job in a newspaper advert over breakfast.

Where does advert come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin advertere, which literally meant 'to turn toward', built from ad- meaning 'to' and vertere meaning 'to turn'. It entered English in the late Middle Ages through Old French, first as a verb meaning to direct one's attention or to refer to something, a sense that survives in formal and legal English where a speaker may 'advert to' an earlier point. The familiar modern noun is much younger and far more casual: it is simply a clipped shortening of 'advertisement', itself from the same Latin root, since an advertisement was originally something that turned the public's attention toward a product. The shared vertere root connects advert to a large family of everyday words, including 'convert', 'reverse', and 'divert', all of which involve some kind of turning. Because the noun is a clipping, the spelling stays close to its longer parent, and the tricky part for writers is simply remembering the single -t ending rather than any doubled letters.

How the word is built

• ad- (to, toward)
• vert (from Latin vertere: to turn)