Viewership

How to spell viewership

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce viewership

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does viewership mean?

1. nounThe number or collective body of people who watch a particular television programme, channel, or video.

Viewership in a sentence

• The finale drew the highest viewership of the entire season.

• Streaming has shifted viewership away from traditional broadcast channels.

Where does viewership come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern English compound rather than a single borrowed word, but its parts have a long history. The core 'view' came into Middle English in the 1300s from Anglo-French 'veue' (a sight or seeing), which traces back to the Latin verb 'videre', meaning 'to see'; that same Latin root sits inside 'vision', 'evident', and 'video'. The agent ending '-er' marks the person doing the action, so a 'viewer' is literally 'one who views'. The final '-ship' is a native Germanic suffix, descended from Old English '-scipe', meaning a state, condition, or collective body, and it is the same ending found in 'friendship' and 'membership'. The full word 'viewership' is a twentieth-century coinage that arrived with broadcasting, naming the collective audience watching a programme or channel, and modelled on the older 'readership' for the people who read a publication.

How the word is built

• view (from Latin videre: to see)
• -er (agent/person who does)
• -ship (suffix forming a noun of state, collective, or quantity)