Literature

How to spell literature

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce literature

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does literature mean?

1. nounWritten works, especially novels, poems, and plays regarded as having lasting artistic merit.
2. nounPrinted material such as leaflets and brochures issued to provide information about a product or service.

Literature in a sentence

• She studied nineteenth-century literature at university.

• The sales team handed out promotional literature at the trade show.

• The museum holds rare manuscripts of classic French literature.

• Please read the safety literature enclosed with the appliance.

Where does literature come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin littera, which simply meant 'a letter of the alphabet'. From that root grew litteratura, a noun that originally referred to writing formed with letters, and then more broadly to learning, scholarship, and the art of grammar. English took the word in during the 1300s through Old French, where it carried the sense of book-learning or familiarity with letters. Only later, around the eighteenth century, did it narrow toward its modern meaning of written works valued for their artistic quality. The same littera sits inside relatives such as 'literal', 'literacy', and 'obliterate', and that shared origin is a useful reminder that the heart of the word is the unstressed but essential middle syllable -te-, the spot writers tend to swallow into 'litrature'.

How the word is built

• liter- (from Latin littera: letter)
• -ature (noun-forming suffix denoting a result or collective body)