Artwork

How to spell artwork

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce artwork

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does artwork mean?

1. nounA painting, drawing, design, or other artistic creation, or the visual material prepared for printing or display.

Artwork in a sentence

• The gallery hung the new artwork near the entrance.

• The designer submitted the artwork for the album cover on Friday.

Where does artwork come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Artwork is a compound built from two much older English words, and its two halves come from very different places. The first half, art, entered English in the 1200s from Old French art, which in turn came from the Latin ars (stem artem), meaning skill or craft; in its earliest use it described any learned skill, only later narrowing to the fine arts. The second half, work, is a native Germanic word descending from Old English weorc, meaning labour or something that has been made, and it has close cousins across the Germanic languages. The combined form artwork is comparatively recent, appearing in the nineteenth century, first in printing and publishing to mean the illustrations and decorative material prepared for a page, and later broadening to mean any artistic creation. Because both parts are short, familiar words joined without any change in spelling, the compound is written as one solid word with no hidden letters, which keeps it easy to spell.

How the word is built

• art (from Latin ars, artem: skill, craft)
• work (from Old English weorc: labour, a made thing)