Verbatim

How to spell verbatim

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce verbatim

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does verbatim mean?

1. adverbIn exactly the same words; word for word, without any change.
2. adjectiveCorresponding word for word to an original source; exact in wording.

Verbatim in a sentence

• adverb

  The clerk copied the witness statement verbatim into the record.

• adjective

  The court ordered a verbatim transcript of the entire hearing.

• adverb

  He repeated the manager's instructions verbatim to avoid any confusion.

• adjective

  She kept a verbatim account of the negotiation in her notebook.

Where does verbatim come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes directly from the Medieval Latin verbatim, meaning 'word for word', which was formed from the classical Latin noun verbum, literally 'a word'. The Latin suffix -atim produced adverbs describing a manner of doing something, so verbatim originally signalled the act of reproducing speech or text one word at a time, leaving nothing changed. English took the term in unaltered Latin form during the late 1400s, mainly in legal and scholarly settings where exact quotation mattered. The same verbum root underlies a whole family of familiar English words, including 'verb', 'verbal', and 'verbose', all of which circle back to the idea of words themselves. Because the spelling is lifted straight from Latin and never anglicised, the trap is the middle vowel: it is -bat- (from verbum plus -atim), not the -bit- that English instinct might suggest.

How the word is built

• verb- (from Latin verbum: word)
• -atim (Latin adverbial suffix meaning 'in the manner of', giving the sense 'word by word')