Words & WritingGreek → English
Glossary
/ˈɡlɒsəri/noun
An alphabetical list of specialised terms with their meanings, usually at the back of a book.
The Greek roots
γλῶσσα
glôssa
tongue, obscure word
Literally: “collection of hard words”
Follow a root:γλῶσσα3 words
The story of the word
To the scholars of Alexandria a γλῶσσα was not language in general but one strange word, archaic or dialectal or foreign, the kind that needed a note in the margin of Homer. Those notes became glosses, and a book of them a glossary. The organ sense survives in medicine, in glottis and hypoglossal, and the language sense in polyglot and in glossolalia, speaking in tongues.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
glosspolyglotglottisglossolalia
In a sentence
The manual runs to eighty pages, forty of them glossary.