Subscriber

How to spell subscriber

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce subscriber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does subscriber mean?

1. nounA person who has signed up to receive a service, publication, or membership, usually by paying regularly.

Subscriber in a sentence

• Every subscriber to the magazine received the special anniversary issue.

• The streaming platform lost more than a million subscriber accounts last quarter.

Where does subscriber come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb subscribere, which literally meant 'to write underneath', from sub meaning 'under' and scribere meaning 'to write'. In Roman times subscribing meant adding your name at the foot of a document to signal agreement, much as we sign at the bottom of a contract today. The word arrived in English in the late 1400s, and 'subscriber' developed as the agent noun for a person who signed up to something, whether endorsing a petition, pledging money to fund a venture, or agreeing to take regular copies of a publication. The same scribere root sits inside a whole family of familiar words such as describe, manuscript, and inscription, which is a handy reminder that the middle is spelled 'scrib', with the 'b' that turns up again in 'subscribe'. The modern sense of someone who pays for ongoing access to a service or magazine grew naturally from that older idea of signing one's name to commit.

How the word is built

• sub- (under)
• scrib (write)
• -er (one who does)