Censorship

How to spell censorship

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce censorship

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does censorship mean?

1. nounThe official suppression or restriction of speech, writing, film, or other material considered objectionable.

Censorship in a sentence

• The journalists protested against the new wave of government censorship.

• Wartime censorship kept troop movements out of the newspapers.

Where does censorship come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The first part of this word comes from the Latin censor, the title of a Roman magistrate whose duties included counting the citizens, assessing their property for taxation, and supervising public morals. That noun grew from the verb censere, which literally meant 'to assess, judge, or estimate'. Because the Roman censors could rebuke citizens and strike them from the rolls, the word gathered the sense of disapproving oversight that it still carries today. English took 'censor' from this source in the 1500s, and the abstract noun was formed by adding the native English suffix -ship, the same ending found in 'friendship' and 'ownership', which marks a state or office. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the soft second 'c' sound is actually written with an 's' (cen-SOR), and the ending is -ship, not - snip or -sip.

How the word is built

• censor (from Latin censor: an official who assesses)
• -ship (Germanic suffix denoting a state, office, or condition)