Tout

How to spell tout

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tout

What does tout mean?

1. verbTo promote, praise, or advertise something energetically in order to persuade others of its merits.
2. nounA person who buys tickets or solicits customers and resells or offers them, often at inflated prices outside a venue.

Tout in a sentence

• verb

  The brochure tries to tout the resort as a family paradise.

• noun

  A tout outside the stadium offered seats at triple the printed price.

• verb

  Politicians often tout figures that flatter their own record.

• noun

  The festival warned fans not to buy from any tout near the gates.

Where does tout come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Tout traces back to the Middle English verb tuten or toten, meaning 'to peer out' or 'to keep a sharp lookout', which itself descends from Old English totian 'to stick out or protrude', as a watchman's head might from a tower. By the 1700s this sense of watching keenly had shifted to the idea of a person on the lookout for customers, especially someone hovering outside an establishment to drum up trade. From there it broadened into the modern senses of soliciting business persistently and of loudly promoting or praising something. The British noun for a person who buys event tickets and resells them at inflated prices grew from this same root, and in horse racing a tout became someone who spies on training to sell tips. The short, plain spelling hides its surprisingly old Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and the 'ou' simply records the long vowel sound that rhymes with 'shout'.

How the word is built

• tout (single root verb/noun, from Middle English tuten/toten: to peer out, watch)