Folio

How to spell folio

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce folio

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does folio mean?

1. nounA single leaf of a book or manuscript, or a numbered page, especially in printing, archives, or bookkeeping.
2. nounA large book or volume made from sheets folded once, giving the biggest standard page size.

Folio in a sentence

• The librarian noted that the missing passage began on folio twelve.

• The auction featured a rare folio of Shakespeare's collected plays.

• Each entry in the ledger references the folio where the account was opened.

• The heavy folio barely fit on the antique reading stand.

Where does folio come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Folio comes from the Latin word folium, which literally meant 'leaf', the same image of a flat, leaf-like sheet that we still use when we call a page of a book a leaf. The specific form folio is a Latin ablative, originally appearing in phrases such as 'in folio', meaning 'on a leaf' or 'on a sheet'. Printers and scribes adopted it for a single sheet of paper folded once to give two leaves, and so it came to name both an individual numbered leaf and the large book size produced this way. English took the term up in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as printing spread, and it became famous through the First Folio, the large 1623 collection of Shakespeare's plays. The same folium root survives in 'foliage' and 'portfolio', and the single -l- and the closing -io are the spots writers most often have to pause over.

How the word is built

• foli- (from Latin folium: leaf)
• -o (Latin ablative ending 'in leaf')