This is one of the words I’d just never paused to think about. Auditorium. It was always just the place we went to in school when the whole school needed to meet.
But last week my husband went, “Oh! I’d never looked at auditorium this way before. As in, auditory. Plus um. Latin.”
To which I went, “Ooooh! Of course. Auditory. Like, a place you go to hear things.”
That is, in fact, the exact definition, directly from the Latin word for “lecture-hall.”
It’s interesting to note, however, that auditorium only dates to 1727. Before that (from the 1300s), the room/building was, in fact, called an auditory! That ranks as something I didn’t know. How about you?
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.