Limelight

How to spell limelight

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce limelight

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does limelight mean?

1. nounThe focus of public attention or fame, especially the position of being prominently noticed.
2. nounAn intense white stage light formerly produced by heating a block of quicklime in a flame.

Limelight in a sentence

• After the award, the young chef found herself thrust into the limelight.

• The Victorian theatre lit its leading actor with a flickering limelight.

• He preferred to manage quietly and leave the limelight to his colleagues.

• Before electric bulbs, a stagehand fed gas to the limelight behind the curtain.

Where does limelight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from a literal piece of nineteenth century stage technology. In the 1820s a Scottish engineer named Thomas Drummond popularised a brilliant light made by directing a flame onto a block of quicklime, which is calcium oxide; the heated lime glowed with an intense white light. The 'lime' here is not the citrus fruit but the old word for quicklime, which traces back through Old English to a Germanic root meaning a sticky or cementing substance, while 'light' is the ordinary native English word for illumination. Theatres adopted this lime light to throw a strong spotlight onto a performer at centre stage, and by the 1860s the device was widely used. From that very concrete origin the phrase 'in the limelight' grew into the familiar figurative sense of being at the focus of public attention, which is how most people use it today.

How the word is built

• lime (calcium oxide, quicklime)
• light (illumination)