Publicist

How to spell publicist

9 letters · 3 syllables

10 of the 37 people asked to spell publicist in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce publicist

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does publicist mean?

1. nounA person whose job is to generate favourable publicity and manage the public image of a client.

Publicist in a sentence

• The actor hired a publicist to handle interviews before the film opened.

• A skilled publicist can place a story in three national papers in a single day.

Where does publicist come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word grew out of public, which English took in the late 1300s from the Latin publicus, meaning 'of the people' or 'belonging to the state', a form influenced by populus, the Latin word for 'the people'. The suffix -ist, from the Greek -istes by way of Latin and French, marks a person who does or practises something. Publicist first appeared in English in the eighteenth century, borrowed from the French publiciste, and originally meant a writer or expert on public law and current affairs. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the sense narrowed and shifted toward its modern meaning: someone whose job is to win favourable attention in the press for a client. The spelling trap is the quiet middle: the -lic- is followed by -ist, not -est, and the c keeps its soft 's' sound.

How the word is built

• public (open to all, of the people)
• -ist (person who practises)

People who misspell publicist also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got publicist wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• butte 100% of them got it wrong