Postmaster

How to spell postmaster

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce postmaster

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does postmaster mean?

1. nounAn official who is in charge of running a post office and its mail services.

Postmaster in a sentence

• The village postmaster knew every customer by name.

• She applied for the vacant postmaster position at the main sorting office.

Where does postmaster come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word joins two older borrowings. The first part, 'post', comes through French from the Latin posita, meaning 'placed' or 'set down', because relays of horses and riders were stationed at fixed points along a road to carry official letters; the network of these stations became known as 'the post'. The second part, 'master', descends from the Latin magister, meaning 'chief' or 'one who has authority', the same root that gives us 'magistrate' and 'maestro'. Put together in English in the late 1500s, a postmaster was literally the man in charge of a posting station and its horses, and only later the official who ran a post office and handled the mail. The spelling stays transparent because both halves remain familiar words, so the only real trap is remembering it is written as one solid word rather than two.

How the word is built

• post- (mail, from Latin posita: stations where horses were placed)
• master (one in charge, from Latin magister)