Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Cadastre
/kəˈdæstər/noun
An official register of land parcels, their boundaries, owners and value.
The Greek roots
κατά
katá
down, along
στίχος
stíchos
line, row
Literally: “line by line”
The story of the word
The usual account runs back to Late Greek κατάστιχον, a register, from the phrase κατὰ στίχον, line by line; it passed into Italian as catastico, then into Provençal and French. A rival derivation from Latin capitastrum, a roll of taxable heads, has never been fully ruled out, and honest dictionaries mark the word as disputed. Either way a cadastre exists because land is easier to tax than anything else: it cannot be hidden or carried away.
- How it travelled
- Late Greek → Italian → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
cadastralacrosticdistich
In a sentence
Napoleon's surveyors spent decades building a cadastre of every field in France.
The dispute was settled by pulling the parcel numbers from the cadastre.