Auditorium

How to spell auditorium

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce auditorium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does auditorium mean?

1. nounA large room or hall built to hold an audience for performances, lectures, or assemblies.

Auditorium in a sentence

• The school assembly was held in the main auditorium.

• The orchestra rehearsed in an empty auditorium before the evening concert.

Where does auditorium come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin auditorium, which literally meant 'a place for hearing', built on the verb audire 'to hear' plus the suffix -orium that Latin attached to mark a place set aside for a particular activity. The same audire root gives us a whole family of familiar English words about hearing and attention, including 'audience', 'audio', 'audible' and even 'audit', which began as a hearing or oral review of accounts. In classical Rome the term could describe a hall or court where cases were heard, and it later passed into English in the 1600s to mean the part of a theatre or hall where the listeners sit. Over time the sense widened to cover the whole large room itself, the space built for an audience to watch and listen. The tidy -orium ending, which also turns up in 'emporium' and 'crematorium', is the spelling that trips people up, since the unstressed vowels before it all blur to the same neutral sound.

How the word is built

• audit- (from Latin audire: to hear)
• -orium (Latin suffix: a place for doing something)