Arts

How to spell arts

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce arts

What does arts mean?

1. nounThe creative and cultural disciplines such as painting, music, dance, and theatre, taken collectively.
2. nounThe academic subjects in the humanities, such as history, languages, and literature, as distinct from the sciences.

Arts in a sentence

• The council cut funding for the arts this year.

• He chose an arts degree rather than a science one.

• She has worked in the performing arts for two decades.

• The university split its faculties into arts and sciences.

Where does arts come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the plural of 'art', which English took from the Old French 'art' in the 1200s, itself descended from the Latin 'ars', whose stem was 'artis'. In Latin 'ars' meant a practical skill or craft, the know-how of doing something well, and it covered everything from carpentry to rhetoric rather than just painting or sculpture. Over the centuries the plural 'arts' came to label whole branches of human accomplishment, both the creative pursuits (music, theatre, painting) and the academic disciplines studied in a faculty of arts, which is why a graduate earns a Bachelor of Arts. The same Latin root also gave English 'artisan', 'artist' and 'artificial', all carrying that core idea of skilled making. The spelling is straightforward, simply 'art' plus an 's', with no silent letters or doubled consonants to trip up a writer.

How the word is built

• art (from Latin ars, artis: skill, craft)
• -s (plural)