Comptroller

How to spell comptroller

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce comptroller

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does comptroller mean?

1. nounA senior official who supervises the financial accounts of a company or public body.

Comptroller in a sentence

• The state comptroller audited every department's spending last quarter.

• As group comptroller, she signed off the annual accounts before the board met.

Where does comptroller come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is really 'controller' wearing a disguise. It comes from the Anglo-French contrerollour and Old French contrerolleur, an official who kept a contre-rolle, literally a 'counter-roll': a second copy of a financial record kept so that one set of accounts could be checked against the other. That gave us the ordinary word 'controller', meaning someone who keeps things in check. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, clerks who assumed the first syllable had something to do with accounting deliberately respelled it 'comp-', mistakenly linking it to the Latin computare, meaning 'to reckon or compute'. The two languages are not actually related here, so the 'p' is a genuine historical error that simply stuck in formal titles. That is the whole spelling trap: the word is pronounced exactly like 'controller', yet the prestigious official version carries a silent, illogical 'mp', which is why even fluent writers hesitate over it.

How the word is built

• comp- (an erroneous respelling, as if from Latin computare 'to reckon')
• troller (from contre-rolle 'counter-roll', a duplicate account-record used for checking)

Words that sound like comptroller

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• controller: A person who directs, manages, or regulates something, especially finances or operations.