What does “rotocalco” mean in Italian?
Quiz assurdo tra cultura generale e giochi di parole
B2 Italian listening practice · Italian · Picked for people who know more
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.
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Harder words in this video
These words are harder than B2. Here is what they mean.
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.