Souvenir

How to spell souvenir

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce souvenir

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does souvenir mean?

1. nounAn object kept or bought as a reminder of a place visited or an event experienced.

Souvenir in a sentence

• She bought a small painted tile as a souvenir of the trip to Lisbon.

• The ticket stub became a treasured souvenir of the championship final.

Where does souvenir come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes directly from the French souvenir, a noun meaning 'a remembrance' or 'a memory', which was simply the verb souvenir, 'to remember', pressed into use as a noun. That French verb descends from the Latin subvenire, which literally meant 'to come up' or 'to come to mind', formed from sub-, meaning 'up from below', and venire, 'to come'. The idea is wonderfully concrete: a memory is something that rises up into the mind, and a souvenir is the object that makes it do so. English borrowed the word in the 1700s, at first in the abstract sense of a keepsake or token of remembrance, before it settled into the modern tourist sense of a small item bought to recall a place. The same venire root still travels through familiar words such as 'venue', 'convene' and 'intervene', and the unexpected -ven- in the middle, rather than the -ven- many writers hear as a plain syllable, is exactly the spot that trips people up.

How the word is built

• sou- (from Latin sub-: up, from below)
• ven (from venire: to come)
• -ir (French verb/noun ending)