Curator

How to spell curator

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce curator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does curator mean?

1. nounA person who selects, organises, and looks after the items in a museum, gallery, or collection.

Curator in a sentence

• The curator arranged the ancient pottery in chronological order.

• As a gallery curator, she chose which paintings to display each season.

Where does curator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes directly from the Latin curator, meaning 'one who has charge of something' or 'a guardian', formed from the verb curare, 'to care for, to look after', which in turn rests on the noun cura, meaning 'care' or 'concern'. In Roman times a curator was an official appointed to manage public works, estates, or the affairs of people unable to manage their own, so the idea of stewardship sits at its heart. English took the word in during the late 1300s, at first for a guardian or someone with formal charge of another's interests, before it settled into its familiar modern sense of the person who looks after the objects in a museum or gallery. The same cura root still nourishes a whole family of English words, including 'cure', 'secure', 'accurate', and 'manicure', all of which carry some thread of 'taking care'. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle: the ending is -ator (matching the agent pattern in 'spectator' and 'aviator'), not -ater, and the first vowel is the soft 'cu' of 'cure'.

How the word is built

• cur- (from Latin cura: care)
• -at- (from curare: to care for)
• -or (agent suffix: one who does)