gazette

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A gazette is a public journal, a newspaper of record, or simply a newspaper.

In English- and French-speaking countries, newspaper publishers have applied the name Gazette since the 17th century; today, numerous weekly and daily newspapers bear the name The Gazette.

Gazette is a loanword from the French language; in turn, the French word is a 16th-century permutation of the Italian gazeta, which is the name of a particular Venetian coin. Gazeta became an epithet for newspaper during the early and middle 16th century, when the first Venetian newspapers cost one gazeta.^[1] (Compare with other vernacularisms from publishing lingo, such as the British penny dreadful and the American dime novel.) This loanword, with its various corruptions, persists in numerous modern languages.

Government gazettes

In England, with the 1665 founding of The Oxford Gazette (which became the London Gazette), the word gazette came to indicate a public journal of the government; today, such a journal is sometimes called a government gazette. For some governments, publishing information in a gazette was or is a legal necessity by which official documents came into force and entered the public domain. Such is the case for documents published in The Gazette of India and in the Royal Thai Government Gazette (est. 1858).

The government of the United Kingdom requires government gazettes of its member countries. Publication of the Edinburgh Gazette, the official government newspaper in Scotland, began in 1699. The Dublin Gazette of Ireland followed in 1705, but ceased when the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom in 1922; the Iris Oifigiúil (Irish: Official Gazette) replaced it. The Belfast Gazette of Northern Ireland published its first issue in 1921.

Gazette as a verb

In English, the transitive verb to gazette means "to announce or publish in a gazette"; especially where gazette refers to a public journal or a newspaper of record. E.g., "Lake Nakuru was gazetted as a bird sanctuary in 1960, then was upgraded to National Park status in 1968."^{[citation needed]} British Army personnel decorations, promotions, and officer commissions are "gazetted" in the London Gazette, the "Official Newspaper of Record for the United Kingdom".^[2]

See also

• List of English words of French origin
• Government Gazette of South Africa

References