Comedian

How to spell comedian

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce comedian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does comedian mean?

1. nounA performer whose job is to make audiences laugh, typically through jokes or comic acting.

Comedian in a sentence

• The comedian opened the show with a routine about airline food.

• Every comedian on the bill that night told jokes about working from home.

Where does comedian come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back through Latin to the Greek komoidia, the name for a comic stage play, which itself joined komos, a band of merry revellers parading at a festival, with aoidos, a singer. From there Latin formed comoedia for a comic drama, and Old French turned the performer into a comedien. English took the word in during the late 1500s, at first meaning simply an actor in comedies rather than a stand-up jokester; the modern sense of a professional funny person grew over the following centuries. A useful spelling memory is that comedian, comedy, and comic all share the same comed/comic stem, and the ending is -ian (as in musician or technician), not -ion, which is the trap most adults stumble over.

How the word is built

• comed- (from Greek komoidia: comic performance)
• -ian (one who does)