Turnout

How to spell turnout

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce turnout

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does turnout mean?

1. nounThe number of people who attend or take part in an event, especially voters in an election.

Turnout in a sentence

• Voter turnout was higher than the council had predicted.

• The bad weather kept the turnout at the charity run quite low.

Where does turnout come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound built from the very old verb 'turn' and the adverb 'out'. 'Turn' descends from Old English 'turnian' and 'tyrnan', meaning to rotate or revolve, which itself was borrowed early from the Latin 'tornare', 'to turn on a lathe', from 'tornus', a turner's wheel; 'out' is purely Germanic, from Old English 'ut', meaning away or outside. The phrasal verb 'turn out' developed many senses, including 'to come out into a public place' and 'to result or end up', and from that the noun 'turnout' was carved off in the early 1800s to mean the number of people who come out for an event. From the same act of coming out smartly it also came to describe a person's overall appearance or equipment, and in the railway world it names a set of points where a track turns out from the main line. The spelling is mercifully transparent because both halves are common everyday words, so the only real care needed is remembering it is written as one solid word rather than two.

How the word is built

• turn (rotate, come out)
• out (adverb particle); a noun formed from the phrasal verb 'turn out'