Portrait

How to spell portrait

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce portrait

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does portrait mean?

1. nounA painting, drawing, or photograph of a person, especially of the face and upper body.
2. nounA format in which a page or image is taller than it is wide.

Portrait in a sentence

• The gallery displayed a famous portrait of the queen.

• Print the report in portrait rather than landscape.

• She commissioned a family portrait for the hallway wall.

• The document looked cramped, so she switched it back to portrait.

Where does portrait come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English from French in the late 1500s. It is the noun use of the Old French past participle 'portrait', meaning 'drawn' or 'depicted', from the verb 'portraire', 'to portray'. That French verb descended from the Latin 'protrahere', which literally meant 'to draw forth' or 'to drag out into view', built from 'pro-' meaning 'forward' and 'trahere' meaning 'to draw' or 'to pull'. Over time the sense narrowed from simply 'drawing out' an image to the modern idea of a likeness of a particular person, especially the face. The same 'trahere' root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'trace', 'tractor', and 'attract', and the buried 'trait' in this spelling is exactly the part learners forget, since the final 't' is often silent in speech.

How the word is built

• por- (forth, from Latin pro-)
• trait (drawn, from trahere 'to draw')