Promotional

How to spell promotional

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce promotional

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does promotional mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to advertising or activity intended to increase the sale or popularity of a product or service.

Promotional in a sentence

• The store sent out a promotional email offering twenty percent off.

• The band released a promotional video ahead of the new album.

Where does promotional come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb promovere, meaning literally 'to move forward' or 'to push ahead', built from pro 'forward' and movere 'to move'. The past participle promotus gave rise to the noun promotio, the act of advancing something or someone. English took 'promote' and then 'promotion' through Old French in the late Middle Ages, originally with the sense of raising a person to a higher rank or office. The adjective 'promotional' is a much later, largely commercial coinage, attached when businesses began advancing the sale of goods through advertising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same movere root quietly powers a whole family of words such as 'motion', 'mobile', and 'remove', and it explains the single 't' followed by '-ional' that trips up writers reaching for a double consonant.

How the word is built

• pro- (forward)
• mot (from movere: to move)
• -ion (noun suffix)
• -al (adjective suffix)