Webinar

How to spell webinar

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce webinar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does webinar mean?

1. nounAn online seminar or presentation delivered live over the internet, often allowing audience questions.

Webinar in a sentence

• The marketing team hosted a free webinar on social media strategy.

• She registered for the webinar but missed the live session and watched the recording instead.

Where does webinar come from?

Language of origin: Other

Webinar is a modern blend word, formed by fusing 'web', short for the World Wide Web, with the tail end of 'seminar'. The older partner, seminar, comes from the Latin seminarium, which literally meant a 'seed plot' or 'nursery for plants', built on semen, the Latin word for 'seed'; in German academic life it came to mean a small group cultivating ideas under a teacher. 'Web' itself is a native English word of Germanic origin, originally describing woven fabric, before it was borrowed for the interlinked network of pages launched in the early 1990s. As online video conferencing spread in the late 1990s and 2000s, marketers needed a snappy term for a seminar delivered over the internet, and 'webinar' was coined by splicing the two. The awkward seam between the words is exactly the spelling trap: writers reach for 'webi-' or double letters, but the form is simply web plus -inar, with a single n carried over from seminar.

How the word is built

• web (the World Wide Web)
• -inar (clipped from seminar)