Pic

How to spell pic

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pic

What does pic mean?

1. nounAn informal word for a picture, especially a photograph or image.

Pic in a sentence

• She sent me a quick pic of the new flat.

• There was a blurry pic of the team on the noticeboard.

Where does pic come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a casual twentieth-century shortening of 'picture', which itself descends from the Latin pictura, meaning 'the art of painting' or 'a painting', built on the verb pingere, 'to paint or to decorate'. The same pingere root gives us 'paint', 'pigment', and 'depict', all of which preserve the idea of marking or colouring a surface. As photography and cinema spread, English speakers clipped 'picture' down to the snappy 'pic', a slang form recorded from around the early 1900s and especially common in the plural 'pics' for photographs. The spelling drops the silent letters of the full word and simply ends in a hard -c, which is why it is sometimes mistakenly written 'pix' or 'pik'. Its informal tone keeps it firmly in conversation, captions, and messaging rather than formal writing.

How the word is built

• pic (clipped form of picture, from Latin pictura: a painting)

Words that sound like pic

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• pick: To choose or select one thing or person from a number of options.