You’re Probably Mispronouncing ‘Biopic’

In 2019, Seth Meyers enlisted his Late Night crew to solve one of Hollywood’s greatest mysteries: How do you pronounce biopic?

The answers were unserious, to say the least. Employees misunderstood the question, instead offering their thoughts on everything from bifocals to elbow packs. Finally, head writer Alex Baze stepped in as the voice of reason. “Well, unfortunately,” he said, “this isn’t one of those things where there are multiple right answers.”

Baze is right: There’s only one correct way to say biopic. But examining why it’s so widely mispronounced is pretty fascinating.

The Origins of the Word Biopic
The Right Way to Pronounce Biopic
Why Do So Many People Mispronounce Biopic?

The Origins of the Word Biopic

The word biopic gained popularity in the 1940s, when picture was still a modern way to refer to a movie. While it’s unclear who first shortened biographical picture to biopic, credit generally goes to entertainment journalists.

“In the smarty-pants talk of the trade press a saloon is a ‘cocktailery,’ a studio chief is a ‘topper,’ and a crew of ‘windjammers’ or ‘musikers’ comprise an ‘ork’ (orchestra),” Associated Press reporter Gene Handsaker wrote in a June 1947 column. “Press agents are ‘flacks,’ dancehalls (palaces of Terpsichore) are ‘terpalaces,’ pictures are ‘pix,’ and a biographical film is a ‘biopic.’ ”

The sports world has always been fertile ground for silver screen origin stories about real people. One early film to be labeled a biopic was Jim Thorpe — All-American (1951) starring Burt Lancaster. Plans for a Jackie Robinson biopic were scrapped in 1948 but then resurrected: The Jackie Robinson Story premiered in 1950, with the baseball legend playing himself.

During the mid-20th century, writers fairly often rendered biopic with a hyphen: bio-pic. With that in mind, you can probably guess how they were pronouncing it.

The Right Way to Pronounce Biopic

Biopic is pronounced “BY-oh-pick.” That’s what Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary both have as the single correct pronunciation of the word. Neither source lists “by-AH-pick,” common as it is, as an acceptable variant.

It’s easy to argue in favor of “BY-oh-pick.” Biopic is short for biographical picture, so you split it into bio and pic. Bio was already short for biography when biopic was coined, so it makes sense that we’d preserve its pronunciation—“BY-oh”—in a compound word involving a biography.

Why Do So Many People Mispronounce Biopic?

Biopic is a misle: a word mispronounced because its spelling leaves room for confusion (awry, epitome, etc.). Bi- and -opic are familiar enough to us that we separate biopic into those parts and assume it’s pronounced like myopic and bionic. Splitting a word into the wrong pieces is known as rebracketing, and it’s given the English language some real gems. Hamburger, for example, started out as Hamburg and -er, but we rebracketed it as ham and burger, making burger its own versatile word.

Rebracketing can change the pronunciation and even meaning of a word. Take outrage, from an Anglo-Norman loanword that combined ultre or outre (“beyond”) with the suffix -age. The term could broadly refer to something beyond normal or acceptable limits—think outrageous. But English speakers saw it as a fusion of out and rage, altering the pronunciation from the original “OUT-ridge,” like advantage and village, to how we say it today. This interpretation gave rise to definitions of outrage involving violence and anger.

But rebracketing might not be solely to blame for biopic’s widespread mispronunciation. English speakers intuitively know that for words ending in -ic, the stress usually goes on the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable. Examples are endless—artistic, economic, heroic, symbolic, titanic. This often requires shifting the stress from where it was in the root word: Artist is “AR-tist,” but artistic is “ar-TISS-tick.” Sometimes we even restore phonemes not heard in the root word so we can stress the penultimate syllable of its -ic form. Ocean, for instance, is pronounced “OH-shin.” Add an -ic and suddenly the short “a” is clear as day: “oh-shee-ANN-ic.”

There are exceptions, from arsenic and Catholic to politics. When we see biopic, though, it’s hard to process it as an outlier when we’re so used to following the rule. Plus, it’s not uncommon for a little oral evolution to occur when you mash two words together—even if you keep the hyphen. Since sci-fi is short for science fiction, shouldn’t we pronounce it “SY-fih,” giving the second syllable a short “i” sound to match fiction? But of course we don’t, because it doesn’t sound as good as “SY-fy.”

As far as English language mistakes go, “by-AH-pick” is a justifiable one. If it sticks around for long enough, dictionaries will eventually add it to the books. It happens more often than you might realize.

Learn More About Pronunciation: