Audition

How to spell audition

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce audition

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does audition mean?

1. nounA short trial performance by an actor, singer, or musician so that a director or panel can judge their suitability.
2. verbTo perform a short trial piece, or to assess someone who is performing one, in order to test suitability.

Audition in a sentence

• noun

  She rehearsed for a week before her audition at the theatre.

• verb

  Hundreds of singers came to audition for the lead role.

• noun

  The casting director scheduled each audition in fifteen-minute slots.

• verb

  The panel had to audition forty dancers before lunch.

Where does audition come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin auditio, meaning 'a hearing' or 'a listening', which was built on the verb audire, 'to hear'. When it first entered English in the late 1500s it kept that literal sense and simply meant the act or power of hearing, a meaning still echoed in relatives such as 'audio', 'audience', and 'auditorium'. Over time the focus shifted from the listener to the performer being listened to, and by the early twentieth century, as theatre and film casting grew formalised, 'audition' came to mean a trial performance staged for someone to hear and judge. The hidden 'audi' root is the key to the spelling: it points back to hearing, which keeps the first vowel an 'a' and the 'di' firmly in place. The same root quietly powers the everyday word 'audit', where accounts were originally read aloud to be heard and checked.

How the word is built

• audit- (from Latin audire: to hear)
• -ion (noun suffix forming an act or process)