Page

How to spell page

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce page

What does page mean?

1. nounOne side of a sheet of paper in a book, magazine, or document.
2. verbTo summon or contact someone by a public announcement or an electronic pager.
3. nounA young attendant who runs errands or assists at a ceremony, such as a boy in a wedding party.

Page in a sentence

• noun

  She turned to the next page of the report.

• verb

  The hospital will page the on-call doctor in an emergency.

• noun

  The small page carried the bride's train down the aisle.

• noun

  The recipe is on the last page of the cookbook.

• verb

  Airport staff can page a missing passenger over the loudspeaker.

• noun

  A hotel page delivered the luggage to the room.

Where does page come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The everyday meaning of page, a single side of a sheet in a book, comes from the Latin pagina, which meant a written column or sheet. That noun was built on the verb pangere, meaning 'to fasten' or 'to fix in place', because the earliest pages were thought of as columns of vine-shoots or rows of text fixed firmly side by side. The word travelled into English through Old French page during the 1300s and quickly settled into its modern bookish sense. The unrelated meaning of page as a young attendant or errand-boy arrived separately, also through Old French, and is usually traced back through Italian paggio and possibly to the Greek pais, meaning 'child'. Because both strands landed on the same short spelling, English simply ended up with one tidy four-letter word covering two very different ideas. The modern verb 'to page someone', meaning to summon them by announcement or pager, grew from that attendant sense, since pages were the ones sent to fetch people.

How the word is built

• page (single root noun/verb; from Latin pagina, a column of writing)