Tourism

How to spell tourism

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tourism

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tourism mean?

1. nounThe activity of travelling for pleasure, and the business of providing services and attractions for such travellers.

Tourism in a sentence

• The coastal town depends heavily on tourism during the summer months.

• The government launched a campaign to boost tourism after the long lockdown.

Where does tourism come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is built on the noun 'tour', which came into English in the 1300s from the Old French 'tour', meaning a turn, a circuit, or a going around, ultimately from the Latin 'tornus', a turner's wheel or lathe, borrowed in turn from the Greek 'tornos', a tool for drawing circles. The underlying idea was always one of moving in a loop and returning to the starting point, which is exactly what a traveller on a tour does. The modern abstract noun 'tourism' is much younger, appearing in English in the early 1800s when leisure travel became fashionable, formed by adding the suffix '-ism' to mark it as an organised practice or activity. Its companion 'tourist' arrived at the same period for the person who takes such trips. The spelling preserves the French 'tour', so the trap is remembering the 'ou' rather than writing it the way it sounds.

How the word is built

• tour (a journey or circuit)
• -ism (noun suffix denoting a practice or activity)