Retrospective

How to spell retrospective

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce retrospective

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does retrospective mean?

1. adjectiveLooking back on or relating to events in the past.
2. nounAn exhibition or compilation surveying a person's work over a long period.

Retrospective in a sentence

• adjective

  The pay rise was retrospective to the start of the financial year.

• noun

  The gallery is hosting a major retrospective of the photographer's career.

• adjective

  A retrospective review of the project revealed several early warning signs.

• noun

  The band released a retrospective covering thirty years of recordings.

Where does retrospective come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built from Latin parts: retro, meaning 'backward' or 'behind', joined to specere, the verb 'to look at'. The blend gives the literal sense of 'looking backward', and it surfaced in English in the seventeenth century, first as an adjective describing thoughts or glances that turned to the past. The same specere root is enormously productive, lurking inside everyday relatives such as 'inspect' (to look into), 'spectator' (one who looks on), and 'spectacle' (a thing looked at). By the nineteenth century the word had grown a noun sense for an exhibition surveying an artist's career, and a legal sense for rules that reach back to govern earlier events. The doubled trap for spellers is the unstressed middle: the 'retro' is clear, but the joins around 'spect' and the final '-ive' invite slips.

How the word is built

• retro- (backward)
• spect (from specere: to look)
• -ive (adjective/noun suffix)