Gallery
nounA room or building used to display or sell works of art.
How to spell gallery
7 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce gallery
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does gallery mean?
- nounA room or building used to display or sell works of art.
- nounThe highest tier of seats in a theatre or concert hall.
Gallery in a sentence
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The new gallery on the high street exhibits local painters.
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The cheapest tickets were up in the gallery near the ceiling.
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She spent the afternoon wandering through the modern art gallery.
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From the gallery the stage looked tiny and distant.
Where does gallery come from?
Language of origin: Italian
The word arrived in English in the 1400s from the Old French galerie, which named a long covered walkway or porch, and that French form rests on the Medieval Latin galeria. The Latin term is widely thought to be an alteration of galilea, the name given to a porch or chapel at the western entrance of a church, perhaps after the biblical region of Galilee. Over time the sense shifted from a covered passage to any long room, and then to a long room used to display pictures, which gave us the modern art gallery by the 1500s. The Italian galleria carried the same idea and reinforced the English use, which is why the word still carries that double L. The theatre sense, the highest tier of cheap upper seats, grew from the same image of a long raised passage running along the back of the building.
How the word is built
- galler- (from Italian galleria: covered walkway)
- -y (noun suffix)
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