Other forms: archives, archived, archiving
An archive is where records go to be kept rather than thrown away — letters, films, minutes of meetings, photographs nobody has asked for in fifty years. A cool room under a library, steel shelves, grey boxes with a date on every lid.
The word covers the collection and the building both, and the plural does either: she found it in the archives. Archive footage is old film pulled out and shown again. There is a verb, and email made it an everyday one — you archive a message instead of deleting it, and it drops out of your inbox and stays on the system. That is the whole point of the word: to archive something is to keep it, out of the way but findable. The person who looks after it all is an archivist, and anything belonging to the collection is archival.
1nounmaterialA collection of documents, films or recordings kept for the record.~76%
“The archive holds every issue of the paper since 1890.”
synonyms: records, collection
2verbarchiveTo move something out of daily use into storage instead of destroying it.~16%
“Archive the thread instead of deleting it.”
3nounroomThe room or building where such a collection is kept.~8%
“The archive is in the basement of the town hall.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 102 sentences found in the wild and placed 84 of them on a sense (18 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ARCH-ive → an ARCH
You push open a door under a stone arch, and the cold room behind it runs back further than you can see: steel shelves, grey boxes, a date on every lid. The letter you threw out last year is sitting in one of them.
hooks ontoarch
The Greek arkheion was the magistrate's office, the building where a town's papers lived. Behind it stands arkhē, which meant both beginning and authority, from arkhō, to begin and to rule. The records belonged to whoever was in charge, so the word for the office became the word for the papers inside it.
French
archive
English, today
archive
Built from
Borrowed from French archive. The is borrowed from French archive, archif, from Latin archīvum, archīum (“archive; room containing an archive; public record office”), from Ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον (“office of a magistrate; public building or office; town hall; (in the plural) archives; public records”), a noun use of the form of ἀρχεῖος (“relating to an office”), from ᾰ̓ρχή (“beginning, origin; authority, sovereignty”) (from ἄρχω (“to begin; to govern, rule”); further etymology uncertain, possibly from Proto-Indo-European h₂er- (“to fit; to fix; to put together”), or h₂ergʰ- (“to begin; to command; to rule”)) + -ῐος. The is derived from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA