Legit

How to spell legit

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce legit

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does legit mean?

1. adjectiveGenuine, honest, or operating within the law; informal for legitimate.

Legit in a sentence

• The buyer checked that the online seller was legit before paying.

• The company turned out to be a legit business with proper accounts.

Where does legit come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is an informal twentieth-century clipping of 'legitimate', which English took in the late 1300s from the Latin legitimus, meaning 'lawful' or 'according to law'. That Latin adjective was built on lex, with the stem leg-, the ordinary word for 'law', the same root that gives us 'legal', 'legislate' and 'legitimate' itself. 'Legit' first surfaced in show-business and theatrical slang of the early 1900s, where 'the legit' meant legitimate, scripted theatre as opposed to vaudeville or burlesque. From there it spread into wider casual speech, broadening to mean genuine, honest, or simply impressive. Because it is a clipped form, the spelling keeps just the first syllables of its parent and drops the rest, so the trap is resisting the urge to add the '-imate' tail.

How the word is built

• shortened clipping of 'legitimate', from Latin legitimus (lawful) built on lex, leg- (law)