Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Stereotypy
/ˈstɛriətaɪpi/noun
Repetitive, apparently purposeless movement, posture or speech, seen in autism, catatonia and captive animals.
The Greek roots
στερεός
stereós
solid, firm
τύπος
túpos
impression, stamp
Literally: “solid stamping”
The story of the word
The parent word was a printing term: a stereotype was a solid metal plate cast from a page of type, so the same page could be struck again and again without resetting. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists borrowed the image for behaviour that repeats identically. The social sense of stereotype, a fixed idea of a group, came later still, through Walter Lippmann in 1922.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
stereotypestereoscopetypetypography
In a sentence
Pacing along the same three metres of enclosure is a classic stereotypy in captive carnivores.
The clinician distinguished stereotypy from tics by its rhythm.