The Collector of Burned Books releases tomorrow!! I’m super stoked…and thought in honor of this book all about the historic Library of Burned Books in Paris, we’d take a look at the history of the word library.
I’ve long known that library has liber (book) as its root, so I didn’t expect any surprises here. But…there are some lurking in the history! For starters, liber actually originally meant “the inner bark of a tree” or “the rind” of something, so the fact that we still have “leaves” associated with pages is totally appropriate. From there, Latin gave us librarium, which meant “a chest of books.”
By the medieval period, that Latin word had come to mean “a collection of books” and then “a bookseller’s shop.” In French and other Latinate languages, words that look like library are indeed still used for places were books are sold, while words like biblioteque (biblio- also meaning “book”) are used for places where books are borrowed. Library arrived in English around the year 1400.
When English-speakers begin to use it for a place from which books could be borrowed? The first appearance of a “lending library” appears in the 1500s, but it didn’t really catch on until the 1700s. Librarian dates from 1713.
But here’s one of my favorite associated factoids. Before the Latin word came into English via French, Old English had another word for collections of books–bochord. Literally “book hoard.” LOVE IT!
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
