Subscription

How to spell subscription

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce subscription

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does subscription mean?

1. nounAn arrangement to receive a service, publication, or product regularly in return for a recurring payment.
2. nounThe act of formally signing up for or pledging support to something, such as a fund or shares.

Subscription in a sentence

• The monthly subscription to the streaming service renews automatically.

• The new share offer was open for public subscription last week.

• She cancelled her magazine subscription after moving abroad.

• The charity raised the building fund entirely through subscription from local residents.

Where does subscription come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin subscriptio, meaning 'a writing underneath' or 'a signature at the foot of a document'. It was built from the verb subscribere, a compound of sub, meaning 'under' or 'below', and scribere, meaning 'to write'. In Roman usage the literal act of writing one's name beneath a text gradually came to imply agreement or commitment, so a 'subscription' was the signature that pledged you to something. English took the word in during the 1400s, at first for the act of signing, and by the 1600s it had stretched to mean the money one pledged by signing up, the sense that dominates today. The same scribere root sits visibly inside 'describe', 'manuscript', and 'inscription', which is a handy reminder that the middle is spelled script, not 'scrip'.

How the word is built

• sub- (under)
• script (from scribere: to write)
• -ion (noun-forming suffix)