Miniseries

How to spell miniseries

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce miniseries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does miniseries mean?

1. nounA television drama or documentary told over a small, fixed number of linked episodes rather than an open-ended run.

Miniseries in a sentence

• The network commissioned a six-part miniseries about the trial.

• She binged the entire miniseries over a single rainy weekend.

Where does miniseries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a twentieth-century compound built from the prefix mini- and the noun series. The prefix mini- was abstracted from miniature, a word that ultimately goes back to the Latin miniare, meaning to colour or paint with minium, a red lead pigment used to mark and decorate small illustrations in medieval manuscripts; because those painted images were tiny, mini- drifted into a general sense of small or short. Series comes straight from the Latin series, meaning a row, chain, or connected sequence, which itself derives from the verb serere, to join or link together. English borrowed series intact in the early seventeenth century, and broadcasters later fused it with mini- to name a television production told over a small, fixed number of linked episodes. The word became common from the 1970s as networks marketed limited-run dramas, and its tidy spelling reflects its parts: mini joined directly to series with no extra letter, so the trap is simply remembering the single i in the -ries ending rather than an -ies plural elsewhere.

How the word is built

• mini- (short, small, from miniature)
• series (a connected sequence of episodes)