Perspective

How to spell perspective

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce perspective

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does perspective mean?

1. nounA particular way of considering or thinking about something, shaped by one's experience or position.
2. nounThe art of representing three-dimensional objects on a flat surface so that depth and distance appear realistic.

Perspective in a sentence

• Reading the report gave her a fresh perspective on the company's finances.

• The student struggled to draw the corridor in correct perspective.

• From a parent's perspective, the new school hours were deeply inconvenient.

• Painters of the Renaissance mastered linear perspective to create convincing depth.

Where does perspective come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb perspicere, which meant 'to look through' or 'to see clearly', built from per- meaning 'through' and specere meaning 'to look'. Medieval Latin formed perspectiva to name the science of optics, the study of how light and sight behave, and that technical sense passed into Old French and then into English in the late 1300s. For its first few centuries the word mostly described optical instruments and the geometry of vision, and only later did artists adopt it for the technique of drawing objects so that they appear to recede convincingly into the distance. From that artistic meaning grew the everyday figurative sense of a mental 'point of view', the way one looks at a situation. The buried spect root is the same one that gives us 'inspect', 'spectacle', and 'spectator', and remembering that you are looking 'through' something helps fix the per- spelling at the front.

How the word is built

• per- (through)
• spect (from specere: to look)
• -ive (noun/adjective suffix)