Youtuber

How to spell youtuber

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce youtuber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does youtuber mean?

1. nounA person who creates and posts videos on the YouTube platform, often as a career or regular hobby.

Youtuber in a sentence

• Her son wants to become a full-time youtuber instead of going to university.

• The company paid a popular youtuber to review its new headphones.

Where does youtuber come from?

Language of origin: Other

This is a very modern coinage built on the brand name YouTube, the video-sharing website launched in 2005. The brand itself joins the pronoun 'you' to 'tube', a long-running informal nickname for the television set that goes back to the cathode-ray tube inside old screens; the name therefore suggested personal television made by ordinary people. Once the platform grew, English added the familiar agent suffix '-er', meaning 'a person who does a thing', exactly as in 'painter' or 'gardener', to name someone who makes a living or a hobby out of posting videos. The word spread rapidly through the 2010s as such creators became cultural figures, and dictionaries began recording it within that decade. Because it descends from a trademark, it keeps the capital pattern of the brand in careful writing, and the single most common spelling slip is simply forgetting that it is written as one solid word.

How the word is built

• YouTube (brand name: 'you'
• 'tube', old slang for a television)
• -er (one who does)