Media

How to spell media

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce media

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does media mean?

1. nounThe collective channels of mass communication, such as newspapers, television, radio, and the internet.
2. nounThe plural of medium, referring to materials, substances, or means through which something is stored or transmitted.

Media in a sentence

• The company hired a firm to manage its relationship with the media.

• The laboratory tested several growth media for the bacterial cultures.

• Social media now drives a large share of the firm's advertising.

• The archive backs up its files across multiple storage media.

Where does media come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the Latin plural of medium, which itself comes from the adjective medius, meaning 'middle' or 'in between'. In Latin a medium was literally something occupying a middle position or acting as a go-between, and that sense of an intermediary is exactly what survives today: the channels that sit in the middle between people and information. English took medium into use in the 1500s, and the plural media followed for any plural set of intermediate substances or means. By the early twentieth century media had narrowed to mean the agencies of mass communication, the press, radio and later television, and now the internet. The spelling keeps the original Latin -a plural ending rather than an English -s, which is why writers sometimes hesitate over whether to treat it as singular or plural.

How the word is built

• medi- (from Latin medius: middle)
• -a (Latin neuter plural ending)