Hologram

How to spell hologram

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce hologram

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hologram mean?

1. nounA three-dimensional image produced by laser light, often used on cards and packaging as a security feature.

Hologram in a sentence

• The new banknote has a shimmering hologram to prevent forgery.

• A tiny hologram on the credit card flashes a different picture when tilted.

Where does hologram come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is a twentieth century coinage built from two ancient Greek pieces. The first part comes from holos, meaning 'whole' or 'entire', the same root that gives us 'holistic' and 'catholic' (literally 'according to the whole'). The second part comes from gramma, meaning 'a thing written or recorded', the element that also ends 'telegram', 'diagram' and 'anagram'. The Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor invented the underlying technique in 1947 and won the Nobel Prize for it, and the term entered general English in the early 1960s once lasers made true three-dimensional images practical. The literal sense is therefore 'a whole recording', because a hologram captures the entire light field of an object rather than a flat photograph. Knowing it is holo- plus -gram, not 'hollow', helps fix the single l in the spelling.

How the word is built

• holo- (from Greek holos: whole, entire)
• -gram (from Greek gramma: something written or recorded)