Disco

How to spell disco

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce disco

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does disco mean?

1. nounA club or social event where people dance to recorded popular music.
2. nounA style of dance music popular in the 1970s, with a steady beat and strong bassline.

Disco in a sentence

• The village hall hosts a disco for teenagers every Friday.

• The radio station plays classic disco from the late seventies.

• They booked a mobile disco for the wedding reception.

• Her playlist mixes funk, soul, and disco.

Where does disco come from?

Language of origin: French

Disco is a shortening of the French word discothèque, which was coined in the 1940s for a club where people danced to recorded music rather than a live band. The French term was modelled on bibliothèque, meaning 'library' or 'book storehouse', by swapping in disque, the French word for a phonograph record or disc; so a discothèque literally meant a 'record storehouse'. The clipped form disco entered English in the 1960s, first naming such venues and then, by the mid 1970s, naming the bright, beat-driven dance music played in them. Both disque and English 'disc' trace back to the Latin discus, a 'flat plate or quoit', which the Romans in turn borrowed from the Greek diskos, the throwing disc of the ancient games. The single c and the plain -o ending are the only real spelling points, since the long Latin and French ancestry has been trimmed away entirely.

How the word is built

• disco- (clipped from discothèque, itself disque 'disc/record'
• -thèque 'storehouse')