Anime

How to spell anime

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce anime

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anime mean?

1. nounA style of animated film and television that originated in Japan, known for vivid art and serialised storytelling.

Anime in a sentence

• The streaming service added a whole catalogue of subtitled anime last month.

• She spent the weekend rewatching her favourite anime series from start to finish.

Where does anime come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

Anime came into English from Japanese, where it is a shortened form of animēshon, the way Japanese speakers wrote and pronounced the English word 'animation'. That English source word goes all the way back to the Latin anima, meaning 'breath' or 'soul', the same root that gives us 'animate' and 'animal'; to animate something was literally to breathe life into it. Japanese borrowed 'animation' in the twentieth century and clipped it down to the snappier anime, which then travelled back into English from the 1980s onward to name a distinctive style of Japanese animated film and television. Because the word loops from Latin through English into Japanese and back again, its spelling keeps the foreign-looking final 'e' that is pronounced as a separate 'ay' sound rather than staying silent. That trailing vowel, said aloud, is the main reason writers must remember the 'e' is there at all.

How the word is built

• anime (an unanalysable borrowing; in Japanese a clipping of animēshon, the Japanese rendering of English 'animation', which traces to Latin anima 'breath, life')