Printer

How to spell printer

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce printer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does printer mean?

1. nounA machine that produces text or images on paper from a computer or other source.
2. nounA person or company whose business is producing printed material such as books, leaflets, or posters.

Printer in a sentence

• The office printer ran out of toner during the busy morning.

• The local printer quoted a fair price for five hundred flyers.

• He connected the new printer to the home network in minutes.

• She sent the manuscript to a commercial printer for binding.

Where does printer come from?

Language of origin: French

The word is built from 'print' plus the agent suffix '-er', which marks a person or device that performs an action. 'Print' itself came into English in the 1300s from the Old French 'preinte', meaning an impression or a mark left by pressing, a noun formed from the verb 'preindre', 'to press'. That French verb descended from the Latin 'premere', 'to press', the same root that gives us 'press', 'pressure', and 'compress'. The earliest 'printers' were people who operated printing presses, and only much later, in the twentieth century, did the word extend to the machines that produce text and images, including the desktop devices attached to computers. The spelling stays regular throughout: the silent shift is only in meaning, never in the letters, so the main thing to remember is the single 't' before the '-er'.

How the word is built

• print (to press an impression onto a surface)
• -er (agent/instrument suffix: one that does)