Codex

How to spell codex

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce codex

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does codex mean?

1. nounAn ancient handwritten book bound along one edge, as opposed to a rolled scroll.
2. nounA systematic written collection of laws, rules, or statutes.

Codex in a sentence

• The museum acquired a ninth-century codex of the gospels.

• The emperor ordered the scattered statutes gathered into a single codex.

• Scholars spent decades transcribing the worn pages of the codex.

• Food safety inspectors refer constantly to the international codex on standards.

Where does codex come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is taken directly, and almost unchanged, from the Latin codex. The original Latin word literally meant the trunk of a tree or a block of wood, and it was an alternative form of caudex with the same meaning. Because the Romans wrote on thin wooden tablets coated with wax and bound them together along one edge, codex came to mean a set of such leaves fastened as a book, in deliberate contrast to the older scroll. By late Roman times it described any bound manuscript, and the form proved so practical that early Christians adopted it for their scriptures, helping the bound book replace the rolled scroll across the ancient world. English borrowed the term in the seventeenth century for old handwritten volumes, and the same wooden root still survives quietly inside the modern word code, which began as a body of laws collected together like leaves in a book.

How the word is built

• codex (Latin: book formed of wooden tablets), plural codices