Paparazzi - Etymology

Etymology

The word "paparazzi" is an eponym originating in the 1960 film La Dolce Vita directed by Federico Fellini. One of the characters in the film is a news photographer named Paparazzo (played by Walter Santesso). In his book Word and Phrase Origins, Robert Hendrickson writes that Fellini took the name from an Italian dialect word that describes a particularly annoying noise, that of a buzzing mosquito. As Fellini said in his interview to Time magazine, “Paparazzo… suggests to me a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging.” There is a similarity with the Italian word "pappataci" a name for a small mosquito. Those versions of the word's origin are nevertheless contested.

The English usage of the word paparazzi is traced to Italian poet Margherita Guidacci, in her translation of George Gissing’s travel book By the Ionian Sea (1901), in which a restaurant owner is called Coriolano Paparazzo. The name was supplied by the screenwriter of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Ennio Flaiano, who in turn got it from Margherita Guidacci's Sulla riva dello Jonio (1957). By the late 1960s the word, usually in the Italian plural form paparazzi, had entered English as a generic term for intrusive photographers. A person who has been photographed by the Paparazzi is said to have been "Papped". In an interview with Fellini's screenwriter Ennio Flaiano, he said the name came from the Italian translation based on a 1901 southern Italy travel narrative by Victorian writer George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea. He further states that either Fellini or Flaiano opened the book at random, saw the name, and decided to use it for the photographer. This story is further documented by a variety of Gissing scholars and in the book A Sweet and Glorious Land: Revisiting the Ionian Sea (St. Martin's Press, 2000) by John Keahey, and Pierre Coustillas.