Etymologically
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picture

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Pronunciation

  • IPA: UK /ˈpɪk.tʃə/, US /ˈpɪk.tʃɚ/[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English pictur, borrowed from Latin pictūra (“painting”),[2][3][4] from pictus (“painted”), past participle of pingere (“to paint, embroider”),[2][3][5] the source of paint,[6][7] from Proto-Indo-European *peig- (“to adorn by colouring or carving”).[5][7] Klein notes that painture is a doublet.[7]

Earliest recorded meaning

Drawing, painting, the act of painting: before 1420, in Lydgate's Troy Book,[3] or about 1420,[8] a sense now obsolete.[2][4]

Semantic evolution

An individual painting or drawing is from 1484,[8] and a portrait from 1505.[8] A mental image is first recorded before 1547, and a vivid verbal description in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, 1588.[3] A person strongly resembling another, as in the picture of his father, is from 1712,[8] and something very beautiful, pretty as a picture, from 1815.[8] The verb meant “to paint, depict” about 1489, “to describe in words” from 1586, and “to imagine” from 1738.[3][8] Picture book is by 1801, picture postcard from 1899, in the picture from 1900, and picture window from 1938.[2] A picture is worth a thousand words is attested from 1918 and probably came from the publishing trade.[2] In British English the pictures is the cinema.[9]

Timeline

  • c. 1420 – the art of painting (Lydgate).[3][8]
  • 1484 – a painting or drawing.[8]
  • c. 1489 – verb, to depict.[3]
  • before 1547 – a mental image.[3]
  • 1588 – a vivid description (Shakespeare).[3]
  • 1738 – verb, to imagine.[3][8]
  • 1801 – picture book.[2]
  • 1918 – worth a thousand words.[2]

Modern meaning

Noun

  1. A painting, drawing or photograph; an image on a flat surface.
  2. A vivid description; a mental image.
  3. A person or thing closely resembling or embodying another: the picture of health.
  4. The general situation: get the picture.
  5. A film, a movie, and the pictures, the cinema.

Verb

  1. To represent in a picture.
  2. To form a mental image of; to visualize.
  3. To describe vividly in words.

Word family

  • picturable
  • picturer
  • picture-perfect
  • picturesque
  • B-picture
  • picturephone
  • depict
  • pictorial
  • paint
  • pigment
  • pinto

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 e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j 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. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000), 4th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin
  6. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  7. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  9. ^ Soanes, Catherine; Stevenson, Angus, eds. (2004), Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press