Bibliography

How to spell bibliography

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce bibliography

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bibliography mean?

1. nounA list of the books, articles, and other sources consulted or cited in a piece of work.

Bibliography in a sentence

• The tutor deducted marks because the essay had no bibliography at the end.

• Every source she quoted appears in the bibliography at the back of the report.

Where does bibliography come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: biblion, meaning 'book' or 'paper', and graphein, meaning 'to write'. The biblion part traces back to Byblos, the ancient Phoenician port through which papyrus was traded, so the very name for a book recalls the place that supplied the writing material. In Greek a bibliographos was literally a 'book writer', that is, a scribe who copied texts by hand. When the word resurfaced in modern European scholarship, it had shifted meaning: by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it described the systematic listing and study of books, and English adopted it in that academic sense. The same biblio- root sits inside 'bible' and 'bibliophile', while the -graphy ending links it to a whole family of words such as 'biography' and 'geography'; remembering that shared -graphy spelling helps fix the ending in place.

How the word is built

• biblio- (book)
• graph (write)
• -y (noun suffix forming an abstract or collective noun)