Photo

How to spell photo

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce photo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does photo mean?

1. nounA picture produced by a camera; a photograph.

Photo in a sentence

• She framed the wedding photo and hung it in the hall.

• Each passport application needs a recent photo of the applicant.

Where does photo come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Photo is a shortened form of photograph, a word coined in the 1830s from two Greek elements: phos, meaning 'light' (its stem is photo-), and graphe, meaning 'drawing' or 'writing'. A photograph was therefore literally a picture 'drawn with light', a neat description of how an image is fixed onto a light-sensitive surface. The clipped form photo appears in casual English by the later nineteenth century, once cameras had become common enough for people to speak of them informally. The same photo- element survives in many scientific terms such as photosynthesis and photon, all of them tied to the idea of light. Because the word keeps the original Greek spelling, the 'ph' is pronounced as an f sound, which is the main thing a writer must remember.

How the word is built

• photo- (from Greek phos/photos: light); a clipped form of photograph