Diary

How to spell diary

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce diary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does diary mean?

1. nounA book in which someone records daily events, appointments, or personal thoughts.

Diary in a sentence

• She wrote in her diary every night before bed.

• He checked his diary to see whether the meeting clashed with the dentist.

Where does diary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin diarium, which originally meant a daily allowance, especially the rations handed out to soldiers or servants for each day. That noun was built on dies, the ordinary Latin word for 'day', so the underlying idea was always something measured out or recorded day by day. By the time English borrowed the word in the late 1500s, the sense had shifted from a daily ration to a daily written record, a book in which a person notes down events as they happen. The same dies root sits inside familiar words such as 'journal' (by way of French diurnalis, 'daily') and 'dial', the device that tracks the passing of the day. Remembering that the heart of the word is dies, 'day', is a useful guard against the very common slip of writing the letters as 'dairy', which instead comes from a quite separate root meaning a place for milk.

How the word is built

• diar- (from Latin diarium, a daily record, from dies 'day')
• -y (noun suffix)