Almanack

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A reference book providing information such as calendars, astronomical data, and other useful facts for a given year
2. A publication that typically contains a calendar, weather forecasts, and various statistical data for a specific year
3. A yearly compilation that includes essential statistics, calendar dates, and often astronomical information for public use

Etymology: The most surprising thing about this word is that its Arabic ancestor may have meant something closer to "climate" than to a book of dates. The Arabic "al-munākh" referred to a climate or a region, and it passed through Andalusian Arabic as "manāḵ", a term for an almanac or calendar. Medieval Latin then took it as "almanachus", and Old French turned it into "almanach", which reached Middle English as "almenak". The shift from a sense of place to a sense of the calendar year is one of those changes that makes sense only once you see how astronomers and farmers tracked the seasons by sky and weather. The spelling "almanack" is simply an older form of the same word, with the final "-ck" that English writers used for a time before "almanac" became standard.

Synonyms: almanac