Exposure

How to spell exposure

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce exposure

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exposure mean?

1. nounThe condition of being subjected to something such as weather, risk, danger, or public attention.
2. nounThe amount of light allowed to reach the camera sensor or film, or a single frame so captured.

Exposure in a sentence

• The hikers suffered from exposure after a night on the mountain.

• She adjusted the exposure to brighten the dim indoor shot.

• The report measured the bank's exposure to risky loans.

• A long exposure blurred the moving traffic into streaks of light.

Where does exposure come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Exposure was built inside English in the early 1600s by attaching the noun-forming suffix -ure to the verb 'expose'. That verb came through Old French 'exposer' and ultimately rests on the Latin 'exponere', which literally meant 'to put out' or 'to set forth', from 'ex-' meaning 'out' and 'ponere' meaning 'to put or place'. The same 'ponere' root, with its odd habit of changing to 'pos' in derived forms, also gives us 'position', 'deposit', and 'compose', which is exactly why the middle of the word is spelled with an 's' rather than the 'z' sound it makes. Originally exposure described the literal act of laying something open to the air or to view, and over time it widened to cover being subject to risk, the public attention given to a person or product, and the precise amount of light let onto film in photography. The quiet trap for writers is that the 's' is pronounced like a 'zh', tempting people to spell it with a z.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• pos (to put or place, from Latin ponere)
• -ure (noun-forming suffix)