A gazette is an
official journal
A government gazette (also known as an official gazette, official journal, official newspaper, official monitor or official bulletin) is a periodical publication that has been authorised to publish public or legal notices. It is usually establis ...
, a
newspaper of record, or simply a
newspaper
A newspaper is a Periodical literature, periodical publication containing written News, information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.
Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as p ...
.
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
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
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 vernacularisms from publishing lingo, such as the British ''
penny dreadful
Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular serial literature produced during the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to ...
'' and the American ''
dime novel
The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term ''dime novel'' has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, r ...
''.) This loanword, with its various
corruptions, persists in numerous modern languages (
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
,
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic l ...
).
Government gazettes
In
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
, 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
A government gazette (also known as an official gazette, official journal, official newspaper, official monitor or official bulletin) is a periodical publication that has been authorised to publish public or legal notices. It is usually establis ...
. 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
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...
. Such is the case for documents published in ''
Royal Thai Government Gazette
The ''Royal Thai Government Gazette'' (, ), frequently abbreviated to ''Government Gazette'' (GG) or ''Royal Gazette'' (RG), is the public journal and newspaper of record of Thailand. Laws passed by the government generally come into force after ...
'' (est. 1858), and in ''
The Gazette of India
''The Gazette of India'' is a public journal and an authorised legal document of the Government of India, published weekly by the Department of Publication, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. As a public journal, the ''Gazette'' prints offi ...
'' (est. 1950).
The
government of the United Kingdom
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, image2 = Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom (HM Government).svg
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, caption = Royal Arms
, date_es ...
requires government gazettes of its member countries. Publication of the ''
Edinburgh Gazette
''The Edinburgh Gazette'' is a newspaper of record (government gazette) of the Government of the United Kingdom, along with ''The London Gazette'' and ''The Belfast Gazette''. It is published by The Stationery Office (TSO), on behalf of His Maje ...
'', the official government newspaper in Scotland, began in 1699. The ''
Dublin Gazette
''The Dublin Gazette'' was the gazette, or official newspaper, of the Irish Executive, Britain's government in Ireland based at Dublin Castle, between 1705 and 1922. It published notices of government business, including Royal Proclamations, the ...
'' 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." British Army personnel decorations, promotions, and officer commissions are gazetted in the ''
London Gazette'', the "Official Newspaper of Record for the United Kingdom". ''Gazettal'' (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
References
External links
*
Gazettes,
Newspaper terminology
Italian inventions
Westminster system×××·
{{newspaper-stub
