Coliseum or Colosseum? The Name Arrived Late

Both spellings work. Neither is what the Romans wrote.

Coliseum and Colosseum are the same word in two spellings, and both are used for the amphitheater in Rome. This site writes Colosseum, which is the form Wikipedia (checked 18 October 2026) uses for the monument and the one closest to the Italian name, Colosseo. Coliseum is the entry word in Wiktionary, which defines it as a large theatre, cinema or stadium, with the London Coliseum as its example, and lists colosseum as an alternative form.

Neither spelling is what the Romans wrote. According to Wikipedia (checked 18 October 2026), citing the Oxford English Dictionary, the building’s Latin name was simply amphitheatrum, and there is no evidence that Amphitheatrum Flavium, the label in many modern books, was used in antiquity. The closest thing to a contemporary title in the sources read for this page is the phrase Caesareo Amphitheatro, “Caesar’s amphitheater”, in the first epigram of Martial’s book on the shows.

The rest is a matter of dates. The word is traced to a statue, the statue stood beside the building for centuries before anyone used its name for the building, and the two spellings turn up in writing at different times. The table puts them in order.

The name in date order

Each row says what stands behind it, because the early rows rest on Latin texts while the later ones rest on dictionary citations that this page read only through Wikipedia’s summary (checked 18 October 2026) of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The statue that lent its name

Suetonius, describing Nero’s Golden House, says its entrance hall was large enough to hold a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high. Platner and Ashby’s 1929 dictionary of ancient Rome names Zenodorus, a Greek, as its maker, and Wikipedia’s article on the statue (checked 18 October 2026) puts the work between AD 64 and 68. Wiktionary traces the English word from Latin Colosseum, the neuter of colosseus, “gigantic”, back to a Greek word for a giant statue. So “named for its size” and “named for the statue” are one chain of meaning, not two rival answers.

The statue did not stay Nero’s. Platner and Ashby say Vespasian changed it into a statue of the Sun. The Historia Augusta then describes Hadrian moving it, with the architect Decrianus, away from the place where the temple of Rome now stands, using as many as twenty-four elephants, and consecrating it to the Sun after removing Nero’s features. Platner and Ashby date the move to perhaps early AD 128 and add that Commodus had it turned into a figure of himself as Hercules. The same chapter of the Historia Augusta lists the Pantheon among the buildings Hadrian restored, and how old the Pantheon really is is argued over in its own right.

Martial keeps the statue and the building apart. In the second epigram of his book on the shows, the colossus that “sees the stars nearer” (sidereus propius uidet astra colossus) is one landmark, and the amphitheater rising where Nero’s pools had been (stagna Neronis erant) is another. The poet who wrote about the building did not call it by the statue’s name.

How the statue’s name reached the building

Nothing in the Roman sources read here applies the statue’s name to the amphitheater. Platner and Ashby’s entry on the building says the name was not transferred to it until after AD 1000. Wikipedia, relying on Richardson’s topographical dictionary, says the Latin name Colosseum had been coined for the amphitheater by the year 1000, from the nearby Colossus of the Sun. Platner and Ashby’s entry on the statue itself says “about 1000”. The three statements sit within a few years of each other, and the sources read here give no finer date. Both put the change in the Middle Ages, roughly nine hundred years after the opening in AD 80.

A twelfth-century record shows the label at an early stage. The structure appears as amphitheatrum colisei, the amphitheater of the colossus, which describes the building by the statue beside it. By the fifteenth century John Capgrave was writing it in English as “collise”.

The most quoted line from the Middle Ages is the couplet that runs “while the coliseus stands, Rome stands”. Which thing it names is where the sources split, and the table near the end of this page sets the two readings side by side. Platner and Ashby side with the statue, so the building reading is the older gloss, and the one Wikipedia (checked 18 October 2026) calls a mistranslation.

Where Coliseum and Colosseum split

The dated forms are in the table above, and what they show is limited. English had spellings with an i in the 15th and 16th centuries (colisee, collise, Collisee), and the earliest Early Modern English citation of the spelling Colosseum is Holland’s translation of 1600. The sources read for this page do not date the spelling “Coliseum” itself, so they cannot show which of the two modern spellings is older.

Neither is a mistake. Grammar.com’s one-line entry lists Colosseum as the alternative and flags only colliseum, with a double l, as wrong.

Coliseum has stayed in use for other buildings. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opened in 1923, according to Wikipedia (checked 18 October 2026), and keeps the i-spelling. A workable rule is to write Colosseum for the Roman building and to copy the spelling of any other venue exactly as that venue writes it.

Where the sources disagree

Four questions about the name and the statue have more than one answer in the sources read for this page. None of them overturns the sequence above, but each is worth knowing before you repeat a one-line version.

For what happened to the building once the name had settled, see when the Colosseum was destroyed, which separates the 1349 earthquake from the centuries of stone removal. A 1572 print series put it beside the seven ancient wonders, a story told in what the eighth wonder of the world is.