Visa

How to spell visa

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce visa

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visa mean?

1. nounAn official authorisation, usually stamped or attached to a passport, that allows a person to enter, stay in, or leave a particular country.

Visa in a sentence

• She applied for a work visa before accepting the job abroad.

• The tourist visa allowed him to stay for ninety days.

Where does visa come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Visa comes ultimately from the Latin verb videre, meaning 'to see', through its past participle visus and the related form visa, literally 'things seen' or 'seen, verified'. The phrase used in administration was charta visa, a 'paper that has been seen', that is, a document an official had examined and approved. French took this up as the noun visa for an official endorsement on a passport, and English borrowed the French word in the early nineteenth century. The same videre root sits behind a whole family of everyday English words, including 'vision', 'visible', 'review', and 'evident', all of which turn on the idea of seeing. Knowing that the word means 'seen' helps fix the simple spelling: just the seeing root vis followed by a single a, with no hidden letters.

How the word is built

• vis- (from Latin videre, 'to see', via the participle visa, 'seen, verified')
• -a (noun ending)