Festival

How to spell festival

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce festival

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does festival mean?

1. nounAn organised series of events or performances held to celebrate something, often music, film, food, or a religious occasion.

Festival in a sentence

• The summer music festival sold out within an hour.

• They booked a tent for the three-day film festival in the city.

Where does festival come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin festivus, meaning 'festive' or 'merry', which itself grew out of festum, a religious feast or holy day, and the related adjective festus, 'joyful'. English took the word in through Old French during the late Middle Ages, where it first appeared as an adjective describing something belonging to a feast day. By the 1500s it had settled into English as a noun naming an organised period of celebration, often tied to the church calendar before it broadened to music, film, and the arts. The same festum root sits behind the everyday words 'feast', 'fest', and 'fiesta', all carrying the idea of communal celebration. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle vowel: it is spelled with an 'i' (fest-I-val), even though the sound is a faint schwa that tempts writers toward an 'a' or 'e'.

How the word is built

• fest- (from festum: a feast or holy day)
• -ival (adjective/noun suffix, from -ivus
• -alis)