Adviser

How to spell adviser

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce adviser

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does adviser mean?

1. nounA person who gives expert advice or guidance, often in a professional or official role.

Adviser in a sentence

• The bank assigned a financial adviser to review her pension.

• As a careers adviser, he helped graduates prepare for interviews.

Where does adviser come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends ultimately from the Latin videre, meaning 'to see', through its past-participle stem visum and the medieval Latin advisare, 'to consider' or 'to look toward something'. The notion of 'seeing toward' a matter naturally became the idea of forming an opinion about it, and that sense passed into Old French as aviser, 'to think over' or 'to counsel'. English took up the verb 'advise' in the 1300s, and by the 1500s the agent noun 'adviser', literally 'one who advises', was in regular use for a person who offers counsel. The spelling trap lives in the ending: the agent suffix here is the native English -er, even though the look-alike -or ending (as in 'advisor') has long competed with it, especially in formal and American usage. The same visum root quietly turns up in 'vision', 'visible' and 'supervise', a useful reminder of the 'see' idea buried inside the word.

How the word is built

• ad- (to, toward)
• vis (from Latin videre/visum: to see)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)

Words that sound like adviser

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• advisor: A person who gives expert or official advice in a particular field.