Other forms: scribes
A scribe is somebody who copied documents by hand. A monastic scribe, the scribe's hand, employ a scribe.
Before printing, every copy of every book was made by one, and the errors they introduced are how scholars trace which manuscript came from which. In carpentry, to scribe is to mark a line, and a scribe is the tool for it.
1nounscribeSomebody who copied documents by hand.
“In the monastery, a scribe spent months copying out a single Bible.”
scribe is a person.
Latin scriba means a clerk or secretary, from scribere, to write. Script and describe are relatives.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kreybʰ-
Old French
scribe — scribe
Middle English
scribe
English, today
scribe
Built from
From Middle English scribe, from Old French scribe (“scribe”), from Latin - usage of scrība (“secretary”) (used in the Vulgate Bible translation to render Ancient Greek γραμματεύς (“scribe, secretary”), which had been used in its turn to render the Hebrew סופר (“writer, scholar”)) from scrībō (“to write, draw, draw up, draft (a paper), enlist, enroll, levy; orig. to scratch”), probably akin to scrobs (“a ditch, trench, grave”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA