Words & WritingGreek → English
Chirography
/kaɪˈrɒɡrəfi/noun
Handwriting treated as a craft, especially penmanship.
The Greek roots
χείρ
kheír
hand
γράφειν
gráphein
to write
Literally: “hand writing”
The story of the word
Kheír is the plain Greek word for hand, and it shows up in English wherever hands do the work: chiropractic, chiromancy for palm reading, and surgery, which is kheirourgía, handwork, worn down through Latin and French until the hand vanished from sight. Chirography was the seventeenth-century name for the art of the pen, taught from copperplate models with quills the writer cut himself. In Roman law a chirographum was a debt acknowledged in the debtor's own hand.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
surgerychiropracticchiromancychiral
In a sentence
The ledger is a small masterpiece of Victorian chirography, every column ruled by hand.