Publicity

How to spell publicity

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce publicity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does publicity mean?

1. nounPublic attention or notice directed at a person, product, or event, often through media coverage or promotion.

Publicity in a sentence

• The film studio spent a fortune on publicity before the premiere.

• The scandal generated more publicity than the company ever wanted.

Where does publicity come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travels back to the Latin publicus, meaning 'of the people' or 'belonging to the state', which was itself shaped by the older poplicus from populus, meaning 'the people'. The modern term was coined in French as publicite during the eighteenth century, where it first meant 'the condition of being public' or 'open to general knowledge'. English borrowed publicity in the late 1700s with that same sense of openness, the opposite of something kept private or secret. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did the commercial meaning bloom, as the word came to describe the deliberate attention drawn to a product, person, or event. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed second syllable swallows the sound, and writers must remember the single c spelled as an s sound before the -ity, just as in 'public' itself.

How the word is built

• public (from Latin publicus: of the people, open to all)
• -ity (noun suffix forming abstract nouns)