Planner

How to spell planner

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce planner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does planner mean?

1. nounA book or app with dated pages used to schedule tasks and appointments.
2. nounA person whose job is to design or organise something in advance.

Planner in a sentence

• She wrote the dentist appointment in her weekly planner.

• The city hired an urban planner to redesign the waterfront.

• The digital planner on his phone synced with the office calendar.

• As a wedding planner she coordinated every supplier and timeline.

Where does planner come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grows out of 'plan', which English borrowed from French in the seventeenth century. The French plan originally meant a flat surface or a drawing of a building seen from above, and it traces back to the Latin planum, meaning 'a level or flat thing', from the adjective planus, 'flat'. From the idea of a flat architectural drawing the sense widened to any scheme worked out in advance, and from there English formed 'planner' by adding the familiar -er ending that turns a verb into the person or thing that performs the action. The same Latin planus also gives us 'plain', 'plane' and 'explain', all of which carry a faint memory of flatness or making something clear. The spelling trap is purely mechanical: because 'plan' ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant after a stressed syllable, that final n doubles before -er, producing 'planner' rather than 'planer'.

How the word is built

• plan (from French plan: flat surface, ground plan)
• -er (agentive/instrumental suffix; the n is doubled to keep the short 'a' sound)