Art & MusicGreek → English
Photogenic
/ˌfoʊtəˈdʒɛnɪk/adjective
Looking attractive in photographs.
The Greek roots
φῶς
phôs
light
-γενής
-genḗs
born of, producing
Literally: “born of light”
The story of the word
The first sense was technical. Fox Talbot called his earliest process photogenic drawing in 1839, meaning produced by light, and bacteriologists later used photogenic for organisms that give light off. The compliment is a twentieth-century arrival, carried into English partly through the French photogénie, which the critic Louis Delluc used for whatever the camera improves. The suffix can mean either producing or produced, which is why both readings are legitimate.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1839
Same family
photographphotongenesispathogenicphosphorus
In a sentence
He is not photogenic and knows it, so he takes the pictures instead.
The valley is photogenic in a way that flattens on film.