Tourist
nounA person who travels to a place for pleasure or interest rather than for work.
How to spell tourist
7 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce tourist
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does tourist mean?
- nounA person who travels to a place for pleasure or interest rather than for work.
Tourist in a sentence
-
The ancient cathedral attracts every tourist who visits the city.
-
A lost tourist asked us for directions to the train station.
Where does tourist come from?
Language of origin: French
The word grows out of the noun 'tour', which English took from the French 'tour', meaning a turn, circuit, or journey, itself from the Latin 'tornare', 'to turn on a lathe', and the Greek 'tornos', a tool for drawing a circle. The underlying image is of going around and coming back, a circuit rather than a one-way trip. By adding the agent suffix '-ist', meaning a person who does a particular thing, English coined 'tourist' around the end of the 1700s for someone who travels for pleasure and curiosity rather than business. The term spread alongside the fashion for the 'Grand Tour', the leisurely circuit of European cities that well-off young Britons undertook to complete their education. Because the spelling keeps the French 'ou' from 'tour', writers must resist the temptation to write it the way it sounds.
How the word is built
- tour (a journey or circuit)
- -ist (one who does something)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.