Chairperson

How to spell chairperson

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce chairperson

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chairperson mean?

1. nounA person who presides over a meeting, committee, board, or organisation.

Chairperson in a sentence

• The chairperson opened the annual general meeting promptly at ten.

• Each department elects a chairperson to represent its interests on the council.

Where does chairperson come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a modern compound built from two older English elements: chair and person. The chair part traces back through Old French chaiere to the Latin cathedra, meaning a seat or chair, which itself came from Greek kathedra, a seat (the root that also gives us cathedral, literally the church that holds the bishop's seat). Long before chairperson existed, the noun chair came to mean the person who presides over a meeting, because that person traditionally occupied the seat of authority at the head of the table. The person element derives from Latin persona, which originally meant a theatrical mask and later an individual human being. Chairperson is a deliberately gender-neutral coinage that gained wide use from the 1970s onward, created to replace chairman and chairwoman; the doubled-up feel of two whole words simply joined together is what occasionally trips up spellers.

How the word is built

• chair (seat of authority, presiding office)
• person (individual)