Bulletin

How to spell bulletin

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce bulletin

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bulletin mean?

1. nounA short official statement or summary of news, issued to the public or to members of a group.

Bulletin in a sentence

• The hospital released a brief bulletin about the minister's condition.

• Staff were asked to read the weekly bulletin before the meeting.

Where does bulletin come from?

Language of origin: French

The word travelled into English through French bulletin, which itself was borrowed from the Italian bullettino, a diminutive of bulletta, meaning a small note or pass. Behind all of these stands the Latin bulla, which originally meant a bubble or any rounded knob, then came to mean the lead or wax seal attached to an official document, and eventually the sealed document itself. So a bulletin was literally a 'little sealed note', an authorised slip of information. English adopted the word in the early 1700s, first for official certificates and public notices issued by authorities. The shared bulla root also gave us 'bull' in the sense of a papal bull, the formal sealed edict, which explains why the spelling keeps the doubled l that catches writers who expect a single one.

How the word is built

• bullet- (from Latin bulla: a seal or sealed document)
• -in (diminutive ending)