Newspaper

How to spell newspaper

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce newspaper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does newspaper mean?

1. nounA printed publication, issued daily or weekly, containing news, articles, and advertisements.

Newspaper in a sentence

• He reads the newspaper over breakfast every morning.

• The local newspaper ran a story about the new hospital.

Where does newspaper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a transparent English compound, joining 'news' and 'paper', and it emerged as printed sheets of current events began circulating in the early 1600s. The element 'news' is simply the plural of 'new', mirroring older forms in other Germanic languages that treated 'new things' as the source of reports; folk explanations claiming it stands for North, East, West, South are charming but false. 'Paper' descends from the Latin papyrus, the reed-based writing material of ancient Egypt, which itself came through Greek and ultimately from an Egyptian word. By the seventeenth century the two words had fused to name the regular printed publication we still buy today. The spelling causes occasional trouble only because the 's' of 'news' sits silently in the middle of the compound, where some writers expect a break or hyphen.

How the word is built

• news (recent reports of events)
• paper (printed sheet); a compound noun