Words & WritingGreek → English
Autograph
/ˈɔːtəɡrɑːf/noun
A person's own signature, especially one collected from someone famous.
The Greek roots
αὐτός
autós
self, same
γράφω
gráphō
to write
Literally: “self-written”
The story of the word
The word first meant a manuscript in the author's own hand, as against a scribe's copy, and textual scholars still call the lost original of a text its autograph. The narrowing to a celebrity's signature is nineteenth-century and came in with the fashion for autograph albums. Greek αὐτόγραφον had only the older sense; the shift happened inside English.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1640s
Same family
autobiographygraphiteparagraphautonomy
In a sentence
No autograph of the play survives, only a printed text from twelve years later.