Grammy

23 September 2026

[A version of this entry originally appeared as a Words in the News segment for paying subscribers.]

The Grammys are given out by the Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences for achievement in the recording/music industry. The awards have been given annually since 1959.

The name is from gram[ophone] + -y, styled after the Emmy, the comparable award for the television industry. That award, in turn, is a variation on immy, a nickname for the image orthicon, an early type of video camera lens.

The earliest use of Grammy that I have spotted is from the Hollywood Reporter of 23 April 1959:

Newly organized Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences is previewing ITS award at the Derby—miniature gramophone called Grammy . . . Grammy, meet Oscar & Emmy

A more expansive piece, explaining the origin of the name, appeared a week later in the New Orleans Times-Picayune of 4 May 1959:

This is the week of Emmy and Grammy. I suppose quite a few people know by now that Emmy is the niece of Oscar and means the award symbol for the top television prizes for the year just ended. Grammy is the name of an award which will be given for the first time this year in the phonograph industry.

“Grammy” was selected because of its nomenclature similarity to grammophone [sic] which is what people used to call the phonograph in America and still do in England.

The Grammy awards in 28 categories of recording activity will be awarded at a banquet Monday night in Beverly Hills, Calif.

When the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences set out to find a name for its equivalent to Oscar and Emmy, some 300 persons usggested [sic] the name Grammy, and of all those who thought this would be a good name for the statuette, a New Orleans girl one the prize for having the earliest post mark on her letter.

Sources:

Connolly, Mike. “Rambling Reporter.” Hollywood Reporter, 23 April 1959, 2/2. ProQuest: Trade Journal.

Myers, Sim. “On the Square: Now Grammy.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 4 May 1959, 32/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1989, s.v. Grammy, n.2.

Photo credit: Unknown photograph, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.