Royalties

How to spell royalties

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce royalties

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does royalties mean?

1. nounSums of money paid to an author, musician, inventor, or owner for the ongoing use of their work, property, or rights.
2. nounMembers of royal families considered as individuals or groups.

Royalties in a sentence

• The novelist lives comfortably on the royalties from her early bestsellers.

• The gala drew visiting royalties from several European courts.

• The band earns royalties every time one of their songs is streamed.

• The museum displayed jewels once worn by various royalties across the centuries.

Where does royalties come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back to the Latin regalis, meaning 'belonging to a king', which itself grew from rex, the ordinary Latin word for 'king'. It travelled into English through Old French, where roi meant 'king' and roialte described the rank, dignity, and power of a monarch, and it settled into Middle English during the 1300s as 'royalty'. For a long time it simply meant kingship or the persons of a royal house. The familiar financial sense, a payment made to someone who owns a right such as a writer, inventor, or landowner, developed much later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the idea of a fee paid to the Crown for the privilege of mining or using land. The spelling keeps the French-flavoured -al before the -ty ending, and the plural simply turns the -y into -ies, which is the small trap that catches writers who reach for a stray apostrophe or forget the i.

How the word is built

• roy- (from Old French roi: king)
• -al (relating to)
• -ty (state/quality, from -té)
• -es (plural)