Words & WritingGreek → English
Stenography
/stəˈnɒɡrəfi/noun
Shorthand writing, done at the speed of speech.
The Greek roots
στενός
stenós
narrow
γραφή
graphḗ
writing
Literally: “narrow writing”
The story of the word
στενός is narrow, and shorthand is writing squeezed into less room. John Willis put the Greek on the title page of his 1602 manual, the first English system with a workable alphabet behind it. Medicine took the same root in a different direction: a stenosis is a narrowing of a vessel or a valve.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
stenosisstenotypecalligraphy
In a sentence
Court stenography still beats speech recognition when three people talk at once.