Etymologically
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media

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Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˈmiː.di.ə/[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin media, the plural of medium (“the middle; a means”), used as the plural of English medium,[2][3][4] from medius (“middle”).[5][6] It is related to mid, middle, mediate, median and immediate.[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

The plural of medium in the sense “an intermediate agency, a channel”, a sense first found in Bacon (1605), is first recorded in Cornelius Felton's Greece, Ancient and Modern (1866).[3]

Semantic evolution

The sense “the means of mass communication”, such as newspapers, radio and television, appears in 1923 as a technical term in advertising, mass media,[3][2][7] and media on its own, used as a singular, is American, from 1927.[3][2]

Timeline

  • 1605 – medium, a channel (Bacon).[3]
  • 1866 – plural media.[3]
  • 1923 – mass media.[3][7]
  • 1927 – media, the press and broadcasting.[3][2]

Modern meaning

Noun

  1. The main means of mass communication, such as newspapers, radio, television and the Internet.
  2. The plural of medium, as in the materials or techniques of an artist.

Word family

  • medial
  • hypermedia
  • intermedia
  • mediacy
  • mediagenic
  • multimedia
  • media center
  • medium
  • mid
  • middle
  • mediate
  • median

Usage notes

A separate word media, from the feminine of Latin medius used on its own, is a term in anatomy for the middle layer of the wall of a blood vessel (1876) and in older phonetics for a voiced stop consonant (1841).[7][4][6]

References

  1. ^ Jones, Daniel (2011), Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 18th ed., ed. Peter Roach, Jane Setter and John Esling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  2. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
  4. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
  5. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000), 4th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin
  6. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
  7. ^ a b c Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)