Rockstar

How to spell rockstar

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rockstar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rockstar mean?

1. nounA famous and successful performer of rock music.
2. nounA person who is exceptionally talented or admired in their field, used informally.

Rockstar in a sentence

• The aging rockstar still sells out arenas across the country.

• The new accountant is a rockstar who cleared the entire backlog in a week.

• The documentary traces how a shy teenager became a global rockstar.

• Managers kept calling their top salesperson a rockstar during the review.

Where does rockstar come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern English compound that simply welds together rock, the post-1950s name for the loud, guitar-driven popular music, and star, a word for a celebrated performer. Both halves are old: rock traces back through 'rock and roll' to the verb meaning to sway back and forth (Old English roccian), while star comes from the Old English steorra for the bright bodies in the night sky, a sense extended to dazzling celebrities by the early 1800s. Joined together, rockstar emerged in the mid twentieth century to name a famous rock musician, and by the 1990s and 2000s it had broadened into business and tech slang for anyone who performs brilliantly at their job. The spelling is often written as one solid word in informal use, though some style guides still prefer 'rock star' as two words. The trap is mainly that closed-up form, since the seam between rock and star hides no awkward letters once you commit to writing it as a single word.

How the word is built

• rock (the music genre, from Old English rocc/stone via the dance-floor sense of rock and roll)
• star (celebrated performer, from Old English steorra)