Art & MusicGreek → English
Lithography
/lɪˈθɒɡrəfi/noun
Printing from a flat stone or plate on which the image is drawn in grease, using the fact that grease and water refuse each other.
The Greek roots
λίθος
líthos
stone
γράφειν
gráphein
to write, draw
Literally: “stone writing”
The story of the word
Alois Senefelder worked it out in Munich in 1796 while trying to print his own plays cheaply, on slabs of Solnhofen limestone from the same Bavarian quarries that produced the Archaeopteryx fossils. English took the word from German Lithographie around 1813. Semiconductors kept the name and dropped the material: photolithography prints circuits with ultraviolet light, and there is no stone anywhere in the building.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German → English
- First recorded
- 1813
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
lithographmonolithmegalithlithosphere
In a sentence
The museum holds every state of the lithography, from the first proof to the edition.