Defamation

How to spell defamation

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce defamation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does defamation mean?

1. nounThe act of damaging someone's reputation by making a false statement about them.

Defamation in a sentence

• The celebrity sued the tabloid for defamation after the false report.

• The lawyer warned that posting unproven claims online could amount to defamation.

Where does defamation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb diffamare, meaning to spread a damaging report about someone, which was built on the noun fama, literally a report, rumour, or public reputation; that same fama gives us the modern word 'fame'. The prefix carried a sense of spreading abroad or running down, so the verb described the act of dragging a person's good name through the mud. Medieval Latin reshaped it as defamare, and from there the noun defamatio passed into Old French as diffamation before reaching English in the 1300s. The original sense was simply the spreading of an ill report, but the meaning narrowed over the centuries into the precise legal idea of a false statement that injures someone's reputation. A useful memory hook is the buried word 'fame' in the middle: defamation literally undoes a person's good fame, which explains the single 'm' and the 'fam' spelling rather than 'fame'.

How the word is built

• de- (down, away from)
• fam (from Latin fama: reputation, report)
• -ation (noun-forming suffix)