Timeline

How to spell timeline

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce timeline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does timeline mean?

1. nounA representation of events arranged in the order they happened, or the planned schedule for a project.

Timeline in a sentence

• The museum exhibit included a timeline of major inventions.

• The project manager pushed back the timeline by two weeks.

Where does timeline come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern compound built from two very old pieces. The first half, time, descends from the Old English tima, meaning a limited span or particular point in time, a thoroughly native Germanic word. The second half, line, traces back to the Latin linea, which originally meant a linen thread or string and later any straight mark drawn on a surface; it reached English through French. The two were welded together only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when historians and editors began drawing literal horizontal lines marked with dates to show events in sequence. From that visual chart the word broadened to mean any ordered schedule of events or any sequence of moments, and in the digital age it gained the familiar sense of a scrolling feed of posts. Because both halves are common everyday words, the spelling is unusually transparent, with no silent letters or doubled consonants to trip the writer.

How the word is built

• time (from Old English tima: a span or point in time)
• line (from Latin linea: a string or row, by way of French)