Art

How to spell art

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce art

What does art mean?

1. nounPaintings, sculpture, and other creative works valued for their beauty or meaning.
2. nounA learned skill or technique applied to a particular activity.

Art in a sentence

• The gallery displays modern art from local painters.

• He has mastered the art of public speaking.

• She studied the history of art at university.

• Negotiating a good salary is something of an art.

Where does art come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin ars, with its stem art-, meaning 'skill', 'craft', or 'a practical ability'. It passed into English in the 1200s through Old French art, where it still carried that broad sense of a learned skill or technique rather than purely creative beauty. For centuries 'art' described any acquired craft, which is why we still speak of the art of cooking or the healing arts, and why a university 'arts' degree once meant the trained skills of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The narrower modern meaning, painting and sculpture and other works valued for beauty, grew up much later, mainly from the 1600s onward. The same Latin ars also gave us 'artisan', 'artificial', and 'artist', all sharing the idea of made-by-skill, and the spelling has stayed remarkably stable because the word is so short.

How the word is built

• art (from Latin ars: skill, craft); a single unanalysable root in modern English