Gazettes

Gazettes

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. (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.