Museum

How to spell museum

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce museum

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does museum mean?

1. nounA building in which objects of historical, scientific, or artistic interest are stored and displayed for the public.

Museum in a sentence

• The natural history museum has a new dinosaur exhibit this spring.

• They spent the rainy afternoon exploring the city museum.

Where does museum come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Latin museum, which itself was borrowed from the Greek mouseion, literally meaning 'a seat or shrine of the Muses', the nine goddesses who presided over poetry, music, and learning. In ancient times such a place was not a gallery of objects but a temple to the Muses and, by extension, a centre of scholarship; the most famous was the Mouseion of Alexandria, a great institution of research that gave its name to the modern idea. English adopted the word in the 1600s to mean a building or room used to house and display objects of artistic, historical, or scientific interest. The same Muse root sits inside the everyday word 'music', which originally meant 'the art of the Muses'. The tricky run of vowels in the middle, the 'useu' sequence, is a direct fossil of that Greek mouseion, and remembering the link to the Muses helps fix the unusual '-eum' ending.

How the word is built

• muse (from the Muses, goddesses of the arts)
• -eum (Greek/Latin suffix marking a place dedicated to something)