Attribution

How to spell attribution

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce attribution

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does attribution mean?

1. nounThe act of crediting a work, statement, or quality to a particular source, author, or cause.

Attribution in a sentence

• The article required clear attribution for every quoted source.

• The painting's attribution to a famous artist doubled its value at auction.

Where does attribution come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb attribuere, meaning 'to assign' or 'to grant to', which was formed from ad- 'to, toward' and tribuere 'to allot, to bestow'. That verb in turn grew out of tribus, the word for a 'tribe', because the earliest sense involved distributing things among the divisions of Roman society. From the verb came the Latin noun attributio, describing the act of assigning something to a source or owner. English took the word in through Old French and Latin scholarship in the late Middle Ages, and by the 1400s it carried today's meaning of crediting a work, quality, or statement to its origin. The same tribuere root still surfaces in relatives such as 'tribute' and 'contribute', and the doubled letters of the prefix (the silent assimilation of ad- into at-) are the main reason writers hesitate over the spelling.

How the word is built

• at- (from ad-: to, toward)
• tribu (from Latin tribuere: to assign, allot)
• -tion (noun of action)