[Ads-l] Pronunciation and antedating of "biopic"

[Ben Zimmer]

In a separate thread, Fred provided this antedating:

---
1946 Variety 21 Aug. 2/5 (ProQuest)
Preem of "The Jolson Story," his Columbia biopic will be at Radio City
Music Hall.
---

(Fred, it's generally better to reply without changing the subject line so
the discussion is threaded properly rather than getting split up.)

If you don't have ProQuest, you can find old issues of Variety on Internet
Archive. Here's a link to Fred's cite:

https://archive.org/details/sim_variety_1946-08-21_163_11/page/2/mode/2up?q=biopic

"Biopic" is used elsewhere in the same issue:

---
1946 Variety 21 Aug. 53/1
The lyric has been so satirized by the Bernard Bros., Joey Adams-Mark
Plant, et al., that its straight singing in the Jolson biopic might have
struck a discordant note.
https://archive.org/details/sim_variety_1946-08-21_163_11/page/52/mode/2up?q=biopic
---

On Internet Archive, you can find several more examples in Variety from
later in 1946.

https://archive.org/search?query=biopic&sin=TXT&sort=date&and%5B%5D=year%3A%5B1946+TO+1946%5D

--bgz

On Wed, Oct 29, 2025 at 10:02 AM Ben Yagoda <byagoda at udel.edu> wrote:

> I’ve written a Substack piece about the currently fairly widespread
> pronunciation of “biopic,” the movie genre, to rhyme with “myopic.” I
> looked into the history of the word as well. The OED’s first citation is a
> July 1947 Variety article, but, writing in Mental Floss about this topic
> earlier this year, Ellen Gutoskey quoted an Associated Press article from
> the previous month, June 1947: '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). Press agents are
> “flacks,” dancehalls (palaces of Terpsichore) are “terpalaces,” pictures
> are “pix,” and a biographical film is a “biopic.”’ (I verified it on
> newspapers.com <http://newspapers.com/>.)
>
> The quote doesn’t name Variety but suggests to me that the term was
> already in use there. If anyone has access to the publication’s digital
> archives, I would be interested to know whether there are any earlier
> “biopic”s.
>
> Here’s a link to my piece (which has a link to the Mental Floss piece):
> https://open.substack.com/pub/benyagoda/p/how-do-you-pronounce-biopic?r=3s77z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
>
>  Ben
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org