Comic

How to spell comic

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce comic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does comic mean?

1. adjectiveCausing or intended to cause laughter; amusing.
2. nounA magazine or booklet that tells a story through cartoon strips.
3. nounA performer whose act is built on making an audience laugh.

Comic in a sentence

• adjective

  The film relies on comic timing to land its best jokes.

• noun

  He kept every comic from his childhood in a sealed box.

• noun

  The club books a different stand-up comic every weekend.

• adjective

  His comic delivery had the whole meeting laughing.

• noun

  The shop sells rare back issues of each comic at a premium.

• noun

  As a comic she could read a crowd and adjust her routine instantly.

Where does comic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word descends from the Greek komikos, meaning 'relating to comedy', which was built on komos, the name for a noisy festive procession of singers and revellers held in honour of the wine god Dionysus. From those riotous celebrations grew komoidia, the staged form we now call comedy, and the adjective komikos described anything belonging to it. The Romans took the word in as Latin comicus, and English adopted it in the late 1500s, at first strictly meaning 'of or relating to comedy' in the theatre. Over time the sense broadened from the stage to anything simply amusing or laughter-provoking, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the noun sense had attached itself to humorous strip cartoons and the magazines that printed them. The single 'm' and the plain '-ic' ending are the usual spelling slips, since the word looks as though it might double a letter the way 'comma' does.

How the word is built

• com- (from Greek komos: revel, merrymaking)
• -ic (adjective/noun suffix)