A gazette is an official 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.
Etymology
Gazette is a
loanword from the French language, which is, in turn, a 16th-century permutation of the Italian gazzetta, which is the name of a particular Venetian coin. Gazzetta became an
epithet for
newspaper during the early and middle 16th century, when the first Venetian newspapers cost one
gazzetta.
(Compare with other
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 (
Slavic languages,
Turkic languages).
Government gazettes
In
England, with the 1700 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 come into force and enter the
public domain. Such is the case for documents published in
Royal Thai Government Gazette (est. 1858), and in
The Gazette of India (est. 1950).
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
Chiefly in British 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. For example, "
Lake Nakuru was gazetted as a bird sanctuary in 1960 and upgraded to
National Park status in 1968."
personnel decorations, promotions, and officer commissions are gazetted in the
London Gazette, the "Official Newspaper of Record for the United Kingdom".
(a noun) is the act of gazetting; for example, "the gazettal of the bird sanctuary".
See also
-
Gazetteer
-
List of British colonial gazettes
-
List of English words of French origin
-
List of government gazettes
External links
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