Producer

How to spell producer

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce producer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does producer mean?

1. nounA person or company that makes goods, or that oversees the financing and creation of a film, show, or recording.

Producer in a sentence

• The film producer approved the budget for the next scene.

• As a record producer, she shaped the sound of the whole album.

Where does producer come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin verb producere, meaning 'to lead forward' or 'to bring forth', built from the prefix pro- 'forward' and the verb ducere 'to lead'. In Roman use it could mean to bring something into being or to extend it, and that core idea of bringing forth survives in the modern sense of a person who makes or brings something into existence. English picked up 'produce' as a verb in the 1400s, and the agent noun 'producer', meaning one who produces, became established by the 1500s. The same ducere root threads through a surprising family of everyday words, including 'conduct', 'reduce', 'introduce' and even 'duke'. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed ending: it is -cer with a soft c, not -ser, and the agent suffix is -er rather than -or, despite the Latin pedigree that fools many writers into expecting -or.

How the word is built

• pro- (forth, forward)
• duc (from Latin ducere: to lead)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)