Origin Story
Tabloid, the word for a sensational popular newspaper, had a surprising beginning: medicine. In 1884 a British pharmaceutical company released powdered drugs pressed into small, hard pills under the trademark Tabloid — a name coined by adding the suffix -oid ("resembling, small") to tablet. The idea was that a single pill held a drug's power in concentrated form. As the brand grew wildly popular, people began using tabloid for anything in compressed form. Before long it was applied to newspapers that packed only the essentials onto small-format pages, giving us the "tabloid newspaper." News, in effect, was compressed just as medicine had been. Over time the word took on a further shade of meaning: "sensational and lightweight."
Tabloid was once a registered trademark, so rival companies could not freely use the word. But it spread so widely that it eventually became a common noun — a classic case of a brand name slipping into everyday language.
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Online Etymology Dictionarytabloid (n.): 1884, "small tablet of medicine," trademark name (by Burroughs, Wellcome and Co.) for compressed drugs, from tablet + -oid; sense of "compressed news" is from 1900
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Oxford English Dictionarytabloid: originally a proprietary name for a medicine in compressed form; later applied to compact newspapers
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Merriam-Webster Dictionaryfrom Tabloid, a trademark for a compressed drug, from tablet + -oid
Word Evolution
Words from the Same Root
Memory Hook
Tabloid comes from the trademark Tabloid for compressed pills. Remember it as: "a small newspaper that compresses news the way a pill compresses medicine."
""A brand that once compressed medicine into a single pill became the newspaper that compresses the news onto a single page.""
