Excerpt

How to spell excerpt

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce excerpt

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does excerpt mean?

1. nounA short passage taken from a longer written or recorded work.
2. verbTo take a short passage from a longer work for separate use.

Excerpt in a sentence

• noun

  The review quoted a long excerpt from the novel.

• verb

  The editors plan to excerpt several chapters for the anthology.

• noun

  She read a brief excerpt of the report aloud at the meeting.

• verb

  The newspaper chose to excerpt only the most damaging lines from the letter.

Where does excerpt come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin excerptum, the neuter past participle of the verb excerpere, which meant 'to pluck out' or 'to select'. That verb was built from ex-, meaning 'out', and carpere, meaning 'to pluck or gather', so an excerpt is quite literally something plucked out of a larger work. The very same carpere lies behind the famous phrase carpe diem, usually translated 'seize the day' but more exactly 'pluck the day', and it is a distant relative of the word 'harvest'. English adopted excerpt in the early 1600s, first as a noun for a chosen passage and soon afterward as a verb for the act of choosing it. The tricky spelling comes straight from that Latin root: the silent middle keeps the 'c' from carpere and the 'p' that follows it, which is exactly why the awkward 'rpt' cluster trips writers up.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• cerpt (from Latin carpere: to pluck, gather)