Americana

How to spell americana

9 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce americana

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does americana mean?

1. nounObjects, materials, or cultural items regarded as typical of the United States and its history.
2. nounA genre of roots music blending country, folk, blues, and rock traditions of the United States.

Americana in a sentence

• The museum devoted an entire wing to vintage americana, including jukeboxes and diner signs.

• The festival lineup leaned heavily toward americana, with banjos and slide guitars on every stage.

• His attic was full of americana, from old baseball cards to faded gas station logos.

• Her latest album drifted away from pop and into stripped-back americana.

Where does americana come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is a modern Latin-style coinage built from America plus the Latin suffix -ana, the neuter plural ending used to label a collection of things connected with a person or place. America itself honours the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, whose Latinised first name, Americus, was applied to the New World on a 1507 map by the cartographer Martin Waldseemueller. The -ana ending follows a long European fashion for gathering writings, anecdotes, and curiosities under a label, as in Shakespeareana or Victoriana, so americana literally means 'American things'. English speakers adopted americana in the eighteenth century to describe books, documents, and artefacts relating to the Americas, and over time it broadened to cover the wider material and cultural heritage of the United States, from folk music to roadside memorabilia. The single -c- and the doubled-up vowels at the end (-ana, not -anna) are the usual stumbling points, both flowing directly from the Latin formation.

How the word is built

• America (the continent/country, named after explorer Amerigo Vespucci)
• -ana (Latin neuter plural suffix meaning 'things relating to')