Bibliographies

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A list of sources, such as books or articles, often detailing authors, titles, and publication information related to a specific topic
2. A systematic enumeration of written works, typically organized for research purposes or to support academic writing
3. Recorded works that provide documentation of literature on a subject, usually presented in an organized format to guide further reading

Etymology: "Bibliographies" is the plural of "bibliography", and the plural form is the one most people meet, since a bibliography is usually one of several lists gathered on a topic. The root of the word is ancient Greek: "biblíon" meant a small book, a diminutive of "biblos", the papyrus or book itself, and "gráphō" meant "I write". Combined into "bibliographía", the term originally meant the act or habit of writing books, and "bibliográphos" was a writer of books. The sense we use today, a list of works on a subject, is a later shift. The word moved from the production of books to the cataloguing of them, so that a bibliography came to describe the record of what had been written rather than the writing itself. The arrangement of entries in an organised format is what makes the list useful as a guide to further reading.

Synonyms: reference lists, works cited, source lists, literature lists, citations