Billboard

How to spell billboard

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce billboard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does billboard mean?

1. nounA large outdoor panel used for displaying advertisements.

Billboard in a sentence

• A giant billboard near the motorway advertised the new car.

• The company paid thousands to rent that downtown billboard for a month.

Where does billboard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Billboard is a straightforward English compound, joining 'bill' and 'board'. The 'bill' here is not money but an old sense of a public notice or poster, which came through Anglo-French and Medieval Latin 'bulla', meaning a sealed document or official paper; by the 1600s 'bill' meant any printed sheet posted up for the public to read. A 'board' was simply a flat plank or panel, a thoroughly Germanic word from Old English 'bord'. Put together in nineteenth-century America, a billboard was literally a board on which bills were pasted, and the term settled into general use for large outdoor advertising panels. Because both halves are common everyday words, the only spelling point worth remembering is the double 'l' in 'bill' meeting the single 'b' of 'board'.

How the word is built

• bill (poster, public notice)
• board (flat surface, panel)