Hype

How to spell hype

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hype

What does hype mean?

1. nounIntense, often exaggerated promotion or publicity intended to build excitement.
2. verbTo promote or publicise something aggressively, often with exaggeration.

Hype in a sentence

• noun

  The new phone arrived with months of relentless hype before launch.

• verb

  The studio tried to hype the film with a massive trailer campaign.

• noun

  The restaurant never lived up to the hype in the reviews.

• verb

  Bloggers were paid to hype the product before its release.

Where does hype come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The exact source of 'hype' is genuinely uncertain, so it sits among the trickier words to pin down. The promotional sense, meaning loud and exaggerated publicity, surfaced in American show-business and advertising slang in the early twentieth century and is widely thought to be a clipping of 'hyperbole', the Greek-derived word for rhetorical exaggeration (from 'huper', meaning over or beyond, and 'ballein', meaning to throw). A separate and older slang 'hype' existed among drug users and con artists, referring to a hypodermic needle and to short-changing or cheating a customer, and some lexicographers suspect the two strands later blurred together. Whichever thread dominates, the modern meaning settled by the 1920s and 1930s and exploded in marketing and entertainment use after the 1960s. Because the word is short and phonetically obvious, the only real spelling pitfall is the silent final 'e' that keeps the vowel long.

How the word is built

• hype (a single root, probably a clipping of an older word; no productive prefix or suffix)