Footnote

How to spell footnote

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce footnote

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does footnote mean?

1. nounA note printed at the bottom of a page giving a reference or extra comment.
2. nounA minor or incidental detail that is added to a larger account.

Footnote in a sentence

• Each footnote at the bottom of the page cited a different source.

• His brief tenure became little more than a footnote in the company history.

• The editor asked her to move the long explanation into a footnote.

• The scandal was reduced to a footnote once the bigger crisis broke.

Where does footnote come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, formed by joining 'foot' and 'note'. The 'foot' element comes from Old English 'fot', the same word for the body part, which by extension came to mean the lowest or bottom part of something, such as the foot of a hill or the foot of a bed. The 'note' element entered English from Old French 'note', which traced back to Latin 'nota', meaning a mark, sign, or written observation. Printers and scholars combined the two in the early 1800s to name a remark printed at the bottom (the 'foot') of a page, keeping comments out of the main text. Because both parts are everyday words and the spelling follows them exactly, footnote rarely trips up writers; the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single closed word.

How the word is built

• foot (bottom of a page)
• note (written remark)