Scribe

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /skɹaɪb/

Definitions

1. A person who writes or copies texts by hand or composes documents ; a professional writer or copyist in ancient times, often associated with religious or legal manuscripts
2. Someone skilled in handwriting or document preparation for others ; an individual who served as a secretary or record keeper in historical or sacred settings
3. An individual who transcribes or records information manually ; a person historically tasked with writing sacred texts or official records

Etymology: Scribe comes from Latin "scrība," a word that Late Latin writers used in the Vulgate Bible to translate the Greek "grammateús," meaning a writer or secretary. That Greek term had itself been used to render the Hebrew "sofer," meaning writer or scholar. So a single job title passed through three languages, carried by translators who needed a word for the officials who copied and kept records in the scriptures. The Latin noun is built from "scrībere," "to write," which originally meant "to scratch" or "to draw lines," a sense that matches the early business of incising letters into wax, stone or clay. The verb "scribe" came into English from the same Latin root through Middle English "scryben," so the noun and verb share a single ancestry. Scribe also has a surprising second life in woodworking. A carpenter who used a compass to mark a line before cutting was said to scribe the wood, so a pointed tool that makes such marks is still called a scribe.

Synonyms: writer, author, copyist

Antonyms: reader