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Paparazzi are aggressive photojournalists who intrude on the lives of the rich and famous.

This word is an eponym and part of its etymology is pretty well known. It’s from the name of a character in a Fellini film.

If you already knew that here’s a little more detail.

According to an 1897 Italian dictionary the word papariare meant “to wander about wasting time.”  There is no concrete connection of this meaning to a family name, but some do associate the word with the name Paparazzo.

As an Italian family name Paparazzo is said to be common in Calabria.

So it was that when the British novelist George Gissing was traveling through Italy in the late 1880s he stayed at a small hotel run by Mr. Coriolano Paparazzo.  He wrote a book about his travels and Frederico Fellini‘s script writer read the book about the time they were casting around for a name for the photographer in their movie La Dolce Vita.

There are tales also that Fellini grabbed the name from an opera but most of the evidence points to the Gissing book which had only just been translated into Italian.

Fellini has said he liked the name because it made him think of a buzzing stinging insect, which matched the character he was trying to portray.

I see one source that claims papatacci means “mosquito” or “midge” which could have been reminiscent to Fellini.

The Oxford English Dictionary adds that in the Abruzzi Italian dialect paparazzo meant “clam” and that the script writer was from Abruzzi so that he might have associated the opening and closing of the camera lens with the opening and closing of a clam.

In any case Fellini’s character was named Paparazzo.

The film appeared in 1960 and in 1961 Time Magazine ran an article Paparazzi on the Prowl.

This according to the OED was the first occurrence of paparazzi in English.  The Time Magazine story is about a pushy photojournalist on a trendy street in Rome and makes it plain that in Italian, Fellini’s film had already turned the name into a noun.

The Time article even explains where the word came from—at least as far back as the movie the year before.

The paparazzo who was the subject of that first Time Magazine citation was Ivan Kroscenko, who supposedly practiced for quick photo-ops by having a friend toss a coin in the air so he could “shoot” it dead centre in his frame; along the lines of a western gunslinger.

According to the New York Daily News Krosenko eventually got tired of provoking celebrities into fits of anger so he could snap a more valuable picture. Evidently he made a public apology to everyone he’d hurt saying he wanted to do good from then on.

I guess just like the paparazzi pictures, doing bad draws more headlines because I can’t find any stories on the good he’s done since then.