Tabloid

How to spell tabloid

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tabloid

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tabloid mean?

1. nounA newspaper with small pages, typically featuring short, sensational stories about crime, celebrities, and scandal.
2. adjectiveRelating to a sensational, simplified style of journalism that favours scandal over depth.

Tabloid in a sentence

• noun

  The actor sued a tabloid over its invented story about his marriage.

• adjective

  The documentary took a tabloid approach, chasing gossip instead of facts.

• noun

  Every tabloid on the rack led with the same celebrity breakup.

• adjective

  Critics dismissed the report as tabloid journalism with little evidence.

Where does tabloid come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word began life as a brand name, not a description of newspapers at all. In 1884 the British pharmaceutical firm Burroughs Wellcome registered 'Tabloid' as a trademark for their compressed medicines, blending 'tablet' with the suffix '-oid', meaning 'resembling' or 'having the form of' (the same ending found in 'humanoid' and 'asteroid'). Because the product squeezed a full dose into a tiny, convenient form, the word quickly came to suggest anything condensed or concentrated, and by the early 1900s journalists were describing compact, easily digested newspapers as 'tabloid' papers. From there it narrowed to mean the small-format press known for short, sensational stories. The spelling trap is the unstressed ending: it is '-oid' (echoing its tablet-like origin), not the '-oyd' the sound might suggest.

How the word is built

• tabl- (from tablet, a compressed pill)
• -oid (resembling, in the form of)