Calligraphy

How to spell calligraphy

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce calligraphy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does calligraphy mean?

1. nounThe art of producing decorative or beautiful handwriting, usually with a special pen or brush.

Calligraphy in a sentence

• She addressed every wedding invitation in elegant calligraphy.

• The museum displayed ancient scrolls covered in delicate calligraphy.

Where does calligraphy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Calligraphy comes from the Greek word kalligraphia, which combined kallos, meaning 'beauty', with graphein, meaning 'to write', so the whole thing literally meant 'beautiful writing'. The same kallos root for beauty turns up in other words such as kaleidoscope, where it describes the lovely shifting patterns. The graphein element is enormously productive in English and gives us graph, autograph, photograph, and biography, all of which involve writing or recording in some way. English picked up the word in the early 1600s, partly through Latin and partly through French, at a time when fine penmanship was a prized and respected craft. The spelling trap lives in that Greek beauty root: the double l of calli- and the ph spelling of the /f/ sound both point straight back to the Greek origin, which is the surest way to remember them.

How the word is built

• calli- (from Greek kallos: beauty)
• graph (from graphein: to write)
• -y (noun suffix)