Scripting

How to spell scripting

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scripting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scripting mean?

1. verbThe act of writing the text of a play, film, broadcast, or speech.
2. verbWriting short programs or sequences of commands that automate tasks within software.

Scripting in a sentence

• The team spent months scripting the final episode of the drama.

• Automating the backups through scripting saved the office hours each week.

• She earns a living scripting commercials for radio stations.

• He learned scripting to handle repetitive data jobs without manual effort.

Where does scripting come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word grows from the Latin verb scribere, meaning 'to write', and its past participle scriptum, meaning 'something written'. From scriptum came the medieval Latin and Old French scrit, which English took up as 'script' in the late Middle Ages to mean a piece of handwriting or a written document. Over time 'script' came to mean the written text of a play, film, or broadcast that performers read from, and in the twentieth century it also named a set of programmed commands. 'Scripting' is the verbal and noun form built with -ing, describing the act of writing such a text or set of commands. The same scribere root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'describe', 'manuscript', and 'subscribe', and because the spelling keeps the tidy 'scrip-' stem there is no hidden silent letter to trip the writer.

How the word is built

• script (from Latin scriptum: something written)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)