Roundup

How to spell roundup

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce roundup

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roundup mean?

1. nounA short report that gathers together the main news, results, or facts on a topic.
2. nounThe driving together of scattered livestock, or any act of gathering people or things into one place.

Roundup in a sentence

• The editor asked me to write a weekly roundup of the company's sales figures.

• The ranch hands spent three days on the autumn cattle roundup.

• The morning news roundup covered the storm, the budget, and the football results.

• Police conducted a roundup of suspects across the city overnight.

Where does roundup come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of the everyday words 'round' and 'up', written as a single closed word. 'Round' came into English from the Old French 'rond' or 'roont', which descended from the Latin 'rotundus', meaning 'circular' or 'wheel-shaped', and the word for a wheel, 'rota', sits behind that. 'Up' is a native Old English word that here carries the sense of gathering or finishing something completely, much as in 'wrap up' or 'add up'. The fused noun 'roundup' was coined in the American West in the second half of the 1800s, originally describing the driving together of scattered cattle into a single herd or circle for branding and counting. From that ranching picture the meaning spread to any act of gathering people, suspects, or facts into one place, and then to the journalistic 'roundup', a tidy summary that collects the day's news into one report.

How the word is built

• round (gather into a ring, from Latin rotundus 'circular' via Old French)
• up (Old English uppe, denoting completion or collection)