Documentaries

How to spell documentaries

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce documentaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does documentaries mean?

1. nounFactual films or television programmes that record real events, people, or subjects.

Documentaries in a sentence

• The streaming service added a whole category of nature documentaries last month.

• He prefers historical documentaries to fictional dramas on a quiet evening.

Where does documentaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin documentum, which meant a lesson, an example, or a piece of proof, itself built on the verb docere, meaning 'to teach' (the same root that gives us 'doctor' and 'doctrine'). By the early 1800s English had the adjective 'documentary', describing something consisting of or based on official documents and evidence. The modern sense of a factual film grew in the 1920s, when the filmmaker John Grierson used 'documentary' to describe cinema that recorded real life rather than staged drama, and the noun soon took an ordinary plural in -ies. Because the base word already ends in a -y after a consonant, that final y turns to -ies in the plural, which is the usual spelling trap here. The buried docu- root, meaning 'to teach', is a useful reminder that a documentary is meant to instruct as much as to entertain.

How the word is built

• docu- (from Latin documentum: lesson, proof)
• -ment (noun-forming)
• -ary (relating to)
• -ies (plural ending)