Mosaic

How to spell mosaic

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mosaic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mosaic mean?

1. nounA picture or pattern made by fitting together many small pieces of coloured stone, tile, or glass.
2. nounA varied whole made up of many different small parts combined together.

Mosaic in a sentence

• The Roman villa had a detailed mosaic on its dining room floor.

• The city is a mosaic of cultures, languages, and traditions.

• Restorers spent months cleaning the ancient mosaic in the cathedral dome.

• The report was a mosaic of statistics drawn from dozens of sources.

Where does mosaic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word travels back through Italian mosaico and Old French mosaique to the Medieval Latin musaicum or mosaicum, the name for a decorative pavement or wall picture assembled from many small coloured pieces. That Latin term is generally traced to the Greek mouseion, meaning a place sacred to the Muses, the goddesses who presided over the arts; ornate artistic work came to be thought of as fit for such a shrine. The craft itself flourished in the Greek and Roman world, where floors and domes were built up tile by tile from chips of stone and glass called tesserae. English took the word in during the late 1300s and 1400s, and the spelling settled with the tricky run of vowels, the -aic ending, where the 'a' and the 'i' belong to separate syllables (mo-SAY-ic). Because that vowel cluster is easy to scramble, writers often slip and reverse it into 'mosiac', which is the central spelling trap.

How the word is built

• mosa- (from Latin musaicum/mosaicum, work of the Muses)
• -ic (adjective/noun suffix)