Readership

How to spell readership

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce readership

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does readership mean?

1. nounThe collective body of people who read a particular publication, or the size of that audience.

Readership in a sentence

• The magazine lost a third of its readership after the price rise.

• Editors track readership figures to set advertising rates.

Where does readership come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a native English formation built on the verb 'read', which descends from the Old English rǣdan, a word that originally meant 'to advise', 'to counsel', or 'to interpret', and only later narrowed to the modern sense of making sense of written symbols. To that ancient root English added the familiar agent suffix '-er', producing 'reader', someone who reads, and then the abstract suffix '-ship', from Old English -scipe, which denotes a condition, quality, or collective group, as in 'friendship' and 'membership'. Stacked together, the parts mean 'the body or community of readers', and by extension the size of a publication's audience. The collective sense of 'readership' is comparatively modern, emerging with the rise of newspapers and magazines in the nineteenth century, when publishers needed a word for the audience they were trying to count and sell to advertisers. Because every piece is a plain English building block, the spelling holds no foreign traps; the only thing to watch is keeping all three parts intact.

How the word is built

• read (from Old English rǣdan: to advise, interpret, read)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)
• -ship (state, body, or collective suffix)