Supervisor

How to spell supervisor

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce supervisor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does supervisor mean?

1. nounA person who oversees and directs the work of others or of a project.

Supervisor in a sentence

• The night-shift supervisor approved the overtime request.

• Her supervisor signed off on the final report before submission.

Where does supervisor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the medieval Latin supervisor, an agent noun built on the verb supervidere, meaning 'to look over' or 'to oversee'. That verb joined the prefix super-, meaning 'over' or 'above', with videre, the ordinary Latin verb 'to see', so a supervisor was literally someone who looks over the work of others. English adopted it in the late 1400s and early 1500s, when it was first used for an overseer or superintendent of a task or estate. The same videre root surfaces in a whole family of English words about seeing, including vision, visible, review and supervise itself, and recognising that vis spelling can help you remember the middle of the word. The spelling trap is the unstressed second half, where the ending is -or rather than the more common -er.

How the word is built

• super- (over, above)
• vis (from videre: to see)
• -or (agent noun suffix)