Other forms: manuscripts
A manuscript is a piece of writing in its unprinted state — what the author has, before a publisher turns it into a book. A novel in a box file under the bed, a stack of pages a publisher's reader works through on the train, a monk's gospel in gold leaf under museum glass.
Two worlds use the word and they barely meet. In publishing you submit a manuscript, an editor marks it up, and it stays a manuscript until it is typeset. In history and libraries a manuscript is a document written out by hand before printing existed — illuminated manuscripts, a twelfth-century manuscript in a monastery library, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The abbreviation is MS, and MSS when there is more than one. And the etymology will mislead you if you let it: a manuscript today does not have to be handwritten at all, and nobody blinks at a manuscript that arrives as an email attachment.
1nounmanuscriptAn author's text as written, before it is printed and published.
“She posted the manuscript to three publishers and waited.”
synonyms: typescript, draft
2nouncodexA document written out by hand, especially an old one.
“The library holds a manuscript copied out in the twelfth century.”
synonyms: codex, scroll
3nounpaperPaper ruled with staves for writing music by hand.
“He kept a pad of manuscript in the piano stool.”
manuscript is a document.
Manuscript came into English in 1597 from Medieval Latin manūscrīptus: Latin manū, 'by hand', and scrīptus, 'written'. Written by hand — that is the whole word. It was never a Classical Latin term but a scholar's coinage in the age of printing, because it took the printing press to make handwritten worth naming.
Medieval Latin
manūscrīptus
English, today
manuscript
Built from
1597, from Medieval Latin manūscrīptus, a gem origin, equivalent to Latin manū + Latin scrīptus. Not found in Classical Latin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA