Artifact

How to spell artifact

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce artifact

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does artifact mean?

1. nounAn object made or shaped by a person, especially one of historical or cultural interest.
2. nounA visible error or distortion in data, an image, or a recording that is produced by the equipment or process rather than the subject itself.

Artifact in a sentence

• The museum displayed a bronze artifact recovered from the dig.

• The scan showed a blurry artifact caused by the patient moving.

• Each artifact in the collection was carefully catalogued and dated.

• Compression left a visible artifact along the edge of the photo.

Where does artifact come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built from two Latin pieces: arte, meaning 'by skill' or 'by art', and factum, meaning 'a thing made' (from facere, 'to make or do'). Put together, the underlying idea is literally 'something made by human skill', which is exactly what an artifact is. The phrase 'arte factum' was being used in scholarly Latin to describe man-made objects, and English adopted it in the early 1800s as archaeology and natural history grew as disciplines. The same factum root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'factory', 'manufacture', and 'fact', all carrying the sense of making or doing. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle vowel, written -i- in this American and Canadian form (the British variant is 'artefact' with an -e-), so the schwa sound gives no clue to the correct letter.

How the word is built

• arti- (from Latin arte, 'by skill or art')
• fact (from factum, 'made or done')

British and American spelling

Artifact is the American spelling. British English spells it artefact.