Glamour

How to spell glamour

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce glamour

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does glamour mean?

1. nounAn attractive, exciting quality that makes a person, place, or thing seem stylish and desirable.

Glamour in a sentence

• The old hotel still has the glamour of its 1920s heyday.

• Behind the glamour of the awards ceremony lay months of hard work.

Where does glamour come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is one of English's stranger words, because it is really 'grammar' in disguise. In Greek, gramma meant 'a letter' or 'a thing written', and grammatike was the art of letters, which passed through Latin and Old French into English as 'grammar'. In the Middle Ages, deep book learning was so rare that it was popularly linked with the occult, so the related word 'gramarye' came to mean magic and hidden knowledge. Scots speakers reshaped 'grammar' into 'glamer' or 'glamour' with the sense of a spell that bewitches the eye and makes things appear other than they are. Sir Walter Scott carried the Scots word into mainstream English in the early 1800s, and over the 1800s its meaning softened from literal enchantment to the dazzling, alluring charm we mean today. The unusual -our ending is a clue to its journey through Scots and French rather than a regular Latin form, which is exactly why the spelling feels slippery.

How the word is built

• glam- (Scots variant of gram-, from 'grammar')
• -our (noun suffix)

British and American spelling

Glamour is the British spelling. American English spells it glamor.