Photographer

How to spell photographer

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce photographer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does photographer mean?

1. nounA person who takes photographs, either professionally or as a hobby.

Photographer in a sentence

• The couple hired a photographer to cover their wedding.

• As a keen amateur photographer, she spent weekends shooting landscapes.

Where does photographer come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: photos, meaning 'light', and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to draw'. The parent noun 'photography' was coined around 1839, in the very years that the technology of capturing images on light-sensitive surfaces was being invented, and it described the new craft as literally 'drawing with light'. The agent noun 'photographer', meaning the person who practises that craft, followed almost immediately in English. Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, is often credited with popularising the photo- terminology in English-speaking science. The spelling trap lives in the soft, unstressed middle: the stressed 'tog' is clear, but the surrounding vowels reduce to a faint schwa, so writers must remember the silent logic of photo + graph rather than how the word actually sounds.

How the word is built

• photo- (light, from Greek phos/photos)
• graph (write/draw, from Greek graphein)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)