What does “rotocalco” mean in Italian?

Quiz assurdo tra cultura generale e giochi di parole

WhatsAppGmailTelegramEmail

B2 Italian listening practice · Italian · Picked for people who know more

💡 Did you know?
rotocalco
Italian word from a printing press
a glossy illustrated magazine — named after the press that printed it

A rotocalco is a glossy illustrated weekly, the kind stuffed with celebrity photographs. The word is machinery: it’s short for rotocalcografia, rotogravure, a printing process that uses engraved rotating copper cylinders. The press gave its name to the paper it produced, then to the whole genre — and eventually to television, where a rotocalco televisivo is a magazine-format news show.

Roto- is the rotating cylinder and calcografia the engraving on copper (Greek khalkós, “copper”). Italian keeps a whole press-room vocabulary alive: la carta stampata, il quotidiano (daily), il settimanale (weekly), il periodico. In this quiz sketch the clue is just “rivista, periodico”, and the contestant, groping for the answer, produces rotogatto, rotocallo, rotocalzo, rotocalio — every near-miss except the word itself.

How common are the words?

How common are the words in this B2 Italian listening practice video?

77.5%
of words are in the top 2,000 most common Italian words
Most of the words in this video are common Italian words.

How common in written Italian

66.3%
Top 1,000
77.5%
Top 2,000
82%
Top 5,000

How common in spoken Italian

70.1%
Top 1,000
83.6%
Top 2,000
100%
Top 5,000

Harder words in this video

These words are harder than B2. Here is what they mean.

achille
10×
Not in top 5,000
(proper noun) Achilles
himalaya
2×
Not in top 5,000
(proper noun) Himalaya
rotocallo
2×
Not in top 5,000
(archaic) scroll

Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.

See Italian Videos You Can Understand on Reelang

Open Italian page