gazette [E17th] The word gazette came via French from Italian gazzetta, a shortening of the Venetian dialect gazeta de la novità ‘a halfpennyworth of news’—the news-sheet sold for a gazeta, a Venetian coin of very little value. The verb phrase to be gazetted [L17th] meant ‘be the subject of an announcement in a gazette’, and ‘be named in a gazette as being appointed to a military command’. Gazetteer is also early 17th century when it meant ‘journalist’: The current use of the word for a geographical index comes from a late 17th-century gazetteer called The Gazetteer’s: or, Newsman’s Interpreter: Being a Geographical Index.