Art & MusicGreek → English
Discography
/dɪˈskɒɡrəfi/noun
A catalogue of the recordings made by a performer, a label or a genre.
The Greek roots
δίσκος
dískos
quoit, flat disc
-γραφία
-graphía
writing, record
Literally: “a written record of discs”
The story of the word
δίσκος was the thing an athlete threw, a flat plate of stone or metal, and through Latin discus it reached English several times over: disc, disk, dish, desk and dais are all the same word arriving in different centuries. Record collectors assembled discography in the 1930s for a complete list of what an artist had put on wax. Radiology uses the identical word for injecting dye into a spinal disc, which makes for confusing searches.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1930s
Same family
discusdishdeskdais
In a sentence
His discography runs to nine albums and a stack of session work.