Script

How to spell script

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce script

What does script mean?

1. nounThe written text of a play, film, broadcast, or speech, including dialogue and stage directions.
2. nounA style of handwriting, or a system of characters used to write a language.
3. nounA short program or sequence of instructions executed automatically by a computer.
4. verbTo write the text for a play, film, or planned performance.

Script in a sentence

• noun

  The actor highlighted every line of her script before the read-through.

• noun

  The invitation was printed in an elegant flowing script.

• noun

  She wrote a small script to back up the files every night.

• verb

  The studio hired her to script the next instalment of the series.

• noun

  The director rewrote the final script the night before filming began.

• noun

  The ancient tablet was carved in a script that scholars still cannot read.

Where does script come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin scriptum, meaning 'a thing written', which is the neuter past participle of scribere, 'to write'. English picked it up in the Middle Ages through Old French as 'escript', and the early forms referred broadly to handwriting and written documents. Over time the spelling lost the leading 'e' and settled into the tidy modern 'script', keeping the hard 'sc' cluster that traces straight back to scribere. The same Latin root is hiding in plain sight inside a whole family of relatives such as 'describe', 'inscription', 'manuscript', and 'subscribe', all of which share that 'scrib'/'script' core. The narrower theatrical sense, the written text of a play or film, only became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a clipping of 'manuscript'.

How the word is built

• script (from Latin scriptum: a thing written), no affixes; root of inscribe, describe, manuscript