Other forms: librarians
A librarian is the person who runs a library: shelving the books, handling the loans, and finding the one thing you half-remember from a title you have got wrong. Behind the desk, with a date stamp and a trolley of returns.
The job is much more about finding than about shushing. A librarian catalogues the stock, orders new books, runs the story hour for small children, and shows students how to search a database. The place is the library and the person is the librarian, a difference learners slip on: you borrow books from a library, and you ask a librarian. There are school librarians, university librarians, and the reference librarian who answers questions all day. Watch the spelling, with the r before the a in the middle, exactly as in library.
1nounlibrarianA person whose job is to look after a library and help people find what is in it.
“The librarian found the book on a shelf nobody had touched for years.”
librarian is a job.
Librarian is library with the ending -an, the ending that turns a place or a subject into the person who belongs to it, as in historian and comedian. It is first recorded in English around 1710, which makes the word far younger than the libraries it describes.
Proto-Indo-European
*lewbʰ- (cut off)
Latin
librarium — bookcase, chest for books
Old French
librairie
Anglo-Norman
librarie
Middle English
librarie
English
library
English, today
librarian
Built from
From library + an. First attested around 1710. library comes 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 lewbʰ- (“to strip, to peel”). Displaced native bochous, from bōchūs (compare bookhouse). roa - 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.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA