Paparazzi

How to spell paparazzi

9 letters · 4 syllables

18 of the 38 people asked to spell paparazzi in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is papparazzi. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

papparazzi paparazzi

What people typed instead

• papparazzi14 people

How to pronounce paparazzi

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does paparazzi mean?

1. nounPhotographers who aggressively pursue celebrities to capture candid pictures, usually to sell to the press.

Paparazzi in a sentence

• The paparazzi waited outside the hotel hoping for a single unguarded photograph.

• The actress hired extra security to keep the paparazzi away from her children.

Where does paparazzi come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word comes from Italian, where it is the plural of paparazzo, the surname of a freelance news photographer in Federico Fellini's 1960 film 'La Dolce Vita'. Fellini said he borrowed the name from a real traveller, Coriolano Paparazzo, mentioned in a nineteenth-century travel memoir he was reading at the time, and he liked how it suggested the buzzing, darting quality of a pestering insect. As soon as the film became famous, the character's name slipped into general use across Europe and reached English in the early 1960s as a label for the aggressive celebrity photographers it described. Because English speakers met the word already in its Italian plural form, the singular paparazzo is rarely used, and many people treat paparazzi as if it were singular. The spelling trap lives in that Italian shape: a single p in each syllable but a doubled z, plus the final -i rather than the English -ies that an ear might expect.

How the word is built

• paparazz- (from the Italian surname Paparazzo)
• -i (Italian plural ending)

People who misspell paparazzi also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got paparazzi wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• unparalleled 100% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 94% of them got it wrong
• connoisseur 78% of them got it wrong