Kate from Arlington, Massachusetts, and her boyfriend disagree about how to pronounce biopic. The confusion arises in part because the -opic at the end looks like the ends of words like myopic and microscopic. It’s actually a shortening of the term biographical picture, so the accent goes on the first syllable. Biopic emerged from Hollywood jargon of the 1940s. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “How Do You Pronounce “Biopic”?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, hi, this is Kate. I’m calling from Arlington, Massachusetts.
Arlington, Massachusetts. How are you doing?
Great. And I was calling because I have a debate with my boyfriend about the pronunciation of a specific word. So I’m hoping you guys are going to prove me right, but I’m not sure. And there is a little bit more history to it, but essentially the word is spelled B-I-O-P-I-C, and I think that it should be pronounced biopic, whereas he thinks it’s biopic.
And Kate Grant always likes to ask, what’s on the line here?
Is it doing dishes for a week?
I think just like a lot of satisfaction.
Okay, so the word B-I-O-P-I-C.
Yep.
Right?
Meaning what?
Meaning a movie about somebody’s life, basically.
Like maybe a biographical film?
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Kate, what we can tell you is that some people pronounce it the way you do, biopic, but the vast majority of folks say biopic, and that’s because it is indeed a biographical film. It’s a combination of the bio from biographical and pic as in pictures. It’s a Hollywood term that arose in the middle of the last century.
Okay.
Well, so is there like an etymological reason that it would be pronounced that way, or is it just sort of what everybody decided to do?
Well, the tricky part about this, and the thing that trips up a lot of people, is that the OPIC at the end of that word looks like a suffix, but it’s not really. So it’s kind of confusing. It’s like the word microscopic or arthroscopic or myopic. You think it’s a suffix, but it’s not because the PIC in there actually refers to the word picture, like a movie. So it divides, the syllables divide between the O and the P. So it’s biopic.
Yeah, it would be easier if they hyphenated it.
Yeah, it’s not divided between the I and the O. It’s divided between the O and the P. I’d estimate about 10% of people say it the way you do. And as a matter of fact, Kate, the pronunciation is included in some dictionaries as a secondary pronunciation, meaning it’s not the one used by most people. American Heritage Dictionary, for example, does include it as a secondary pronunciation. Cambridge University Press gives biopic as the American pronunciation, but that gives the wrong impression and suggests that all Americans say that, and we don’t.
Oh, okay.
Well, it sounds like I’m not wrong, so I’ve got that going for me.
If you want to be devious, find the American Heritage Dictionary online. I believe it’s still online in full. Go to the entry for biopic. Send it to your boyfriend. Say, look, my pronunciation is there. And don’t tell him about any of the rest of this conversation.
That’s the first thing I’m going to do.
Kate, thanks so much for calling.
Take care.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, you too.
Bye-bye.
Have a good day.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
You know, we have a bunch more words like this where we take the first part of two words and combine them together. And they almost always keep the pronunciation of the syllables that are joined together to form a new word.
Right.
Like fro-yo or pro-am or sitcom or slow-mo.
Yeah.
There is one exception, though. Can you think of it?
Sci-fi.
Sci-fi.
Yeah, we don’t say sci-fi. We say sci-fi.
Oh, I guess we do. That’s because it was modeled on hi-fi. They intentionally coined it to sound like the word hi-fi. But the truth is there’s actually two other things happening with hi-fi. It’s a weird one. Some people jokingly pronounce it as skiffy, especially if they’re talking about bad science fiction. And other people just say SF to skip the sci-fi word altogether, which they love.
Oh, interesting.
I didn’t know that. You know, I’m thinking, too, how similar biopic looks to bionic.
I never thought about that.
But it’s so close. I could see where bioanalogy.
Right. And biopsy and myopic, as you said.
There are other words. So biopic is a stranger. Other words that are spelled and constructed this way, they’re not pronounced like that. So bioanalogy, you want it to sound like these other words that you already know, this category of words that have the stress in a different place.
I have always thought it was a shortening of biographical epic. Also, bio-pic just sounds weird.