Holographic

How to spell holographic

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce holographic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does holographic mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to holograms or the technique of producing three-dimensional images using laser light.
2. adjectiveDescribing a document, especially a will, written entirely in the author's own handwriting.

Holographic in a sentence

• The new banknote carries a holographic security strip that shifts colour when tilted.

• The court accepted the holographic will because it was written and signed in her own hand.

• The museum exhibit used a holographic display to project a rotating model of the engine.

• A holographic note left in the desk drawer was treated as a valid amendment to the estate.

Where does holographic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: holos, meaning 'whole' or 'entire', and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to draw'. The older sense entered English through legal and scholarly use, where a 'holograph' was a document written wholly in the author's own hand, a meaning that survives in talk of a holographic will. The far more familiar modern sense arrived in the twentieth century: the physicist Dennis Gabor coined 'hologram' and its relatives around 1947 to 1949 for a method of recording a 'whole' light field, capturing the complete wavefront rather than a flat picture. The adjective 'holographic' simply attaches the standard -ic ending to describe anything of or relating to that recording technique or to the three-dimensional images it produces. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: writers reach for 'holo' but the schwa vowels and the silent rhythm of holo-graph-ic make the exact letters easy to slur.

How the word is built

• holo- (whole, entire)
• graph (write, draw)
• -ic (adjective suffix)