Art & MusicGreek → English
Photograph
/ˈfoʊtəɡræf/noun
A picture made by recording light on a sensitive surface.
The Greek roots
φῶς, φωτός
phôs, phōtós
light
γράφειν
gráphein
to write, scratch
Literally: “written by light”
The story of the word
John Herschel put the word into English in 1839, the year the daguerreotype was announced, though Hercules Florence had already written photographie in Brazil five years earlier. The second root is the ordinary Greek verb for scratching marks into wax or stone, so the coinage says light does the scratching. Talbot, who had his own process, preferred to call his images photogenic drawings and lost.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1839
Same family
photonphosphorusgraphitetelegraphphotocopy
In a sentence
The only photograph of my grandfather in uniform sits on the hall shelf.
He photographs badly, which is unfair to a man that handsome.