Visitor

How to spell visitor

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce visitor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visitor mean?

1. nounA person who comes to see a place or another person, typically for a short time.

Visitor in a sentence

• Every visitor to the museum must sign the register at the front desk.

• The hospital limits each patient to one visitor during the evening.

Where does visitor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word visitor comes from the Latin verb visitare, meaning 'to go to see' or 'to inspect', which was itself a frequentative form of visere, 'to look at carefully', built on videre, 'to see'. The same videre root gives English a whole family of sight words such as vision, video, and evident. English took the word in through Old French visiter during the 1300s, and the agent noun visitor, 'one who visits', is recorded from the late 1300s onward. The spelling trap lives entirely in the ending: although the word is built on the verb visit, the agent suffix here is -or rather than -er, so writers who default to the more common -er ending tend to produce the wrong 'visiter'. Remembering that it descends straight from a Latin agent form helps fix the -or in the mind.

How the word is built

• visit (from Latin visitare: to go to see)
• -or (agent suffix: one who does)