Visual

How to spell visual

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce visual

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visual mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to seeing or to things perceived through the eyes.
2. nounA picture, chart, or graphic used to support a presentation or broadcast.

Visual in a sentence

• adjective

  The museum offers a visual guide for visitors who prefer images to text.

• noun

  Each slide needs a single bold visual rather than crowded paragraphs.

• adjective

  Strong visual memory helps her recall faces and diagrams with ease.

• noun

  The editor cut to a striking visual as the narrator finished speaking.

Where does visual come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb videre, meaning 'to see', whose past-participle stem visus gave rise to the late Latin adjective visualis, 'relating to sight'. English took it up in the late 1300s through the scholarly vocabulary of optics and philosophy, where writers discussed the 'visual rays' once thought to stream from the eye. The same videre root quietly underpins a whole family of everyday words, including vision, visible, evidence, supervise, and even the casual television. Over the centuries the adjective broadened from the strict sense of eyesight to anything that appeals to the eye, and by the twentieth century it had also settled into a noun for the pictures and graphics used in presentations and film. The spelling trap is purely in the ending: the Latin -alis becomes a soft, unstressed '-ual' that sounds like 'yoo-uhl', so writers must remember the u sitting between the s and the l.

How the word is built

• vis- (from Latin videre: to see)
• -u- (linking vowel)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)