Proxy

How to spell proxy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce proxy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does proxy mean?

1. nounA person authorised to act or vote on behalf of another, or the authority that allows this.
2. nounA server or service that acts as an intermediary between a user's computer and the wider internet.

Proxy in a sentence

• Unable to attend the meeting, she appointed a proxy to vote in her place.

• The company routes all staff traffic through a secure proxy to filter content.

• Shareholders who cannot attend may cast their ballots by proxy.

• He configured a proxy in his browser settings to reach the blocked site.

Where does proxy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Proxy is a worn-down contraction of the Middle English word procuracie, which in turn came from the Latin procuratio, meaning 'the management or care of another person's affairs'. That noun was built on the verb procurare, formed from pro- 'on behalf of' and curare 'to take care of, to attend to', so the literal idea was someone taking care of business for somebody else. English borrowed the term through Anglo-French legal vocabulary in the fifteenth century, originally describing the authority to act for another, and only later the person who holds that authority. The same curare root sits inside everyday relatives like 'cure', 'curator', and 'procure', all of which carry a sense of looking after or seeing to something. The heavy compression of procuracie down to a tidy two-syllable 'proxy' is exactly why the spelling looks so unlike its long Latin parent, and the closing -xy is the small trap that catches writers.

How the word is built

• prox- (contracted from Latin procuratio 'management of another's affairs')
• -y (noun suffix)