library
Meanings
noun
- An institution which holds books and/or other forms of media for use by the public or qualified people often lending them out, as well as providing various other services for its users.
- Any institution that lends out its goods for use by the public or a community.
- A collection of books or other forms of stored information.
- An equivalent collection of analogous information in a non-printed form, e.g. record library.
- A room dedicated to storing books.
- A collection of software routines that provide functionality to be incorporated into or used by a computer program.
- A collection of DNA material from a single organism or relative to a single disease.
- The deck or draw pile.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
From Middle English librarie, from Anglo-Norman librarie, from Old French librairie, from Latin librarium (“bookcase, chest for books”), from librarius (“concerning books”), from liber (“the inner bark of trees; paper, parchment, book”), probably derived from a Proto-Indo-European base *leub(ʰ)- (“to strip, to peel”). Displaced native Middle English bochous, bokhus (literally “book house”), from Old English bōchūs (compare bookhouse). Romance cognates often mean “bookshop” instead: French librairie, Italian libreria, Spanish librería, Romanian librărie and Portuguese livraria. This is a relatively recent innovation (16th century in French), which ended up displacing the earlier sense.
Synonyms
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Translations
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.