Photography

How to spell photography

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce photography

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does photography mean?

1. nounThe art, practice, or process of producing images by recording light, typically with a camera.

Photography in a sentence

• She studied photography at art college before opening her own studio.

• The magazine is known for its striking nature photography.

Where does photography come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek roots: phos, photos, meaning 'light', and graphein, meaning 'to write or draw'. Put together it literally means 'drawing with light', a neat description of how an image is captured by exposing a light-sensitive surface. The term was coined in the early 1800s as the technology emerged, and it is usually credited to the scientist Sir John Herschel, who used it publicly around 1839 when reporting on the new picture-making process. English took it as a compound of those classical elements rather than borrowing a single ready-made word. The same photo- element appears in 'photon' and 'photosynthesis', while the -graph part connects it to 'telegraph' and 'autograph'; remembering 'photo' plus 'graph' helps keep the spelling steady, since the unstressed middle vowel tends to blur in speech.

How the word is built

• photo- (from Greek phos, photos: light)
• -graph (from graphein: to write or draw)
• -y (noun suffix denoting a practice or art)