Librarian

How to spell librarian

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce librarian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does librarian mean?

1. nounA person who manages or works in a library, helping people find and borrow books and other resources.

Librarian in a sentence

• The librarian helped me track down an out-of-print reference book.

• After thirty years cataloguing rare manuscripts, she retired as head librarian.

Where does librarian come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin librarius, an adjective meaning 'relating to books', which was itself built on liber, the Latin word for 'book'. Interestingly, liber originally referred to the inner bark of a tree, the very material on which early people once wrote, so the modern meaning travelled from a layer of bark to the bound volumes we know today. English adopted 'librarian' in the early 1600s, at first sometimes meaning a scribe or copyist before settling on the person who looks after a collection of books. The same liber root sits inside the word 'library' and the French 'livre', which is exactly why the spelling keeps that tricky 'rar' sequence in the middle. Writers often slip because the spoken word sounds like 'lie-brairy-un', tempting people to drop or rearrange the second 'r'.

How the word is built

• librar- (from Latin librarius: relating to books)
• -ian (one who does or belongs to)