Photograph

How to spell photograph

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce photograph

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does photograph mean?

1. nounA picture made with a camera by recording light onto film or a digital sensor.
2. verbTo capture an image of someone or something using a camera.

Photograph in a sentence

• noun

  I took a photograph at sunset.

• verb

  She was hired to photograph the wedding ceremony.

• noun

  There's a faded photograph on the mantelpiece.

• verb

  Reporters tried to photograph the actor leaving the hotel.

Where does photograph come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word photograph is built from two Greek elements: phos, meaning 'light', and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to draw'. Put together the parts literally mean 'drawing made with light', which neatly captures how a camera records an image by exposing a surface to light. The term was coined in the early nineteenth century, around 1839, as inventors raced to fix images chemically; the astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel is usually credited with popularising 'photography' and 'photograph' in English. The same phos root sits in 'phosphorus' (literally 'light-bearer') and in 'photon', while the graphein root turns up in 'autograph', 'paragraph' and 'telegraph'. Knowing that the ending is the Greek -graph, the same spelling found in those relatives, is the surest way to remember the 'ph' rather than an 'f'.

How the word is built

• photo- (from Greek phos: light)
• -graph (from graphein: to write/draw)