In the governments of Commonwealth countries, a gazette is an official journal that publishes the texts of the new laws and government decisions.
The word comes from gazzetta, a Venetian coin used to buy early Italian newspapers; the coin became a name for the papers themselves. The word was loaned into English to describe a newspaper.
"Gazette" came to be used for an official government paper with the creation of the London Gazette, first published in 1665 under the title of The Oxford Gazette. This was one of the first publications in the world that could be termed a "newspaper". The Edinburgh Gazette came into existence in 1699, the Dublin Gazette in 1706 and the Belfast Gazette appeared in 1921.
"Gazette", by extension, has come to be used as the name of mainstream newspapers in the print media, such as the Montreal Gazette (for others in this genre, see The Gazette).
The word "gazette" is also used as a transitive verb, meaning to announce or publish in a gazette: "Lake Nakuru was gazetted as a bird sanctuary in 1960, then was upgraded to National Park status in 1968."
