Mic

How to spell mic

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mic

What does mic mean?

1. nounA microphone, the device that converts sound into an electrical signal for amplifying or recording.
2. verbTo fit a person or instrument with a microphone for amplification or recording.

Mic in a sentence

• noun

  The singer tapped the mic to check it was working.

• verb

  The sound crew arrived early to mic each panel speaker.

• noun

  A clip-on mic kept his hands free during the presentation.

• verb

  Engineers usually mic the drum kit with several separate units.

Where does mic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a twentieth-century clipping of microphone, a word assembled from two Greek elements: mikros, meaning 'small', and phone, meaning 'sound' or 'voice'. The full term microphone was coined in the 1600s for an instrument to amplify faint sounds, and it settled into its modern electrical meaning in the late 1870s as the telephone and recording industries grew. Studio and broadcast workers needed a quick spoken shorthand, and the abbreviation 'mic' appeared on equipment labels and in technical jargon through the mid-1900s. A rival spelling, 'mike', became common in casual writing because it matches the way the word sounds, and that tension between the label-derived 'mic' and the phonetic 'mike' is the whole spelling trap. The clipped 'mic' keeps the first three letters of microphone, which is why it does not carry the silent final 'e' that 'mike' suggests.

How the word is built

• mic (clipping of microphone: micro- 'small'
• -phone 'sound/voice')

Words that sound like mic

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• mike: An informal word for a microphone, the device that converts sound into an electrical signal.