Photographic

How to spell photographic

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce photographic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does photographic mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to photography, or resembling the detailed accuracy of a photograph.

Photographic in a sentence

• The museum displayed rare photographic equipment from the early days of the camera.

• She has an almost photographic memory for faces she has met only once.

Where does photographic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word descends from two Greek roots: phos, meaning 'light', whose stem is photo-, and graphein, meaning 'to write' or 'to draw'. The noun 'photograph' was coined in 1839, when the new technology of fixing images with light was being developed; the term literally describes 'drawing with light', a neat label for what a camera does on a chemically treated surface. The adjective 'photographic' was formed shortly afterwards by adding the common Latin-derived suffix -ic, which turns a noun into a describing word. The same photo- element appears in 'photon' and 'photosynthesis', while the graph- element survives in 'paragraph', 'autograph' and 'telegraph'. For spelling, the trap is the unstressed middle: the 'pho-TOG-ra-phic' stress hides the second 'o' and the 'a', and the two ph spellings (not f) must both be remembered.

How the word is built

• photo- (Greek phos/photos: light)
• graph (Greek graphein: to write/draw)
• -ic (adjective suffix)