Royalty

How to spell royalty

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce royalty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does royalty mean?

1. nounMembers of a royal family, or the status and rank of being royal.
2. nounA sum paid to an author, musician, or inventor for each sale or use of their work.

Royalty in a sentence

• Crowds gathered outside the palace hoping to glimpse royalty.

• The novelist earns a royalty on every copy the publisher sells.

• The museum displays jewels once worn by European royalty.

• The songwriter receives a small royalty each time the track is streamed.

Where does royalty come from?

Language of origin: French

Royalty comes from the Old French word roialte, itself built on roial 'kingly', which descends from the Latin regalis, meaning 'belonging to a king'. That adjective traces back to rex, the Latin word for 'king', whose root carries the sense of one who rules or keeps things in a straight line, the same ancient root behind words like 'regal', 'regent', and even 'rectangle'. English took the word in during the 1300s, first to describe the rank, dignity, and persons of kings and queens. By the 1800s a striking new commercial sense had grown up: a 'royalty' became a share of profits paid to the owner of a right, originally rights granted by the Crown over things like mines, which is how a word for kingship came to mean a payment to an author or inventor. The spelling keeps the French-derived 'roy' and the soft middle, so the trap is remembering the 'al' before the '-ty' rather than writing 'roylty'.

How the word is built

• roy- (from Latin regalis: kingly, via Old French roial)
• -al
• -ty (noun suffix forming a state or quality)