Museum
/mjuˈziːəm/noun
A building where objects of artistic, historical or scientific interest are kept and shown.
The Greek roots
Literally: “place of the Muses”
The story of the word
The Mouseion at Alexandria was not a display of objects but a salaried research institute with a dining hall, a walk, and the Library attached; Euclid and Eratosthenes worked there. The English word arrives in the seventeenth century meaning a scholar's cabinet of curiosities, and the Ashmolean opened to the public in 1683 with the modern sense already in place. The Muses themselves numbered nine and covered astronomy and history alongside dance and epic, which is a wider brief than most museums manage.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1610s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The museum is free, which is the only reason he ever went in.