Album

How to spell album

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce album

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does album mean?

1. nounA collection of musical recordings released together as a single body of work.
2. nounA book with blank pages for holding photographs, stamps, or other keepsakes.

Album in a sentence

• The band recorded their first album in a small studio.

• She slid the holiday photos into the leather album.

• The new album topped the charts within a week of release.

• His stamp album held collections from dozens of countries.

Where does album come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes directly from the Latin album, the neuter form of the adjective albus, which simply meant 'white'. In ancient Rome an album was a white board or tablet, coated with chalk or whitewash, on which public notices, names, and official records were written for everyone to read. From that idea of a blank surface ready to receive entries, the word came into use in the 1600s for a blank book in which people collected things such as autographs, verses, or keepsakes. By the nineteenth century it commonly meant a bound book of blank pages for mounting photographs or stamps, and in the twentieth century it was extended to a bound set of records and then to any single released collection of recorded music. The same albus root gives us 'albino' and 'albumen' (the white of an egg), and remembering that 'white' core helps fix the single 'l' and the plain -um ending.

How the word is built

• alb- (from Latin albus: white)
• -um (Latin neuter noun ending)