Textbook

How to spell textbook

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce textbook

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does textbook mean?

1. nounA book used as a standard work for the study of a particular subject.
2. adjectiveConforming exactly to an expected or standard pattern; perfectly typical.

Textbook in a sentence

• noun

  The university textbook cost more than her weekly grocery bill.

• adjective

  The surgeon described it as a textbook recovery with no complications.

• noun

  He left his chemistry textbook on the train and had to borrow a friend's copy.

• adjective

  The pilot executed a textbook landing despite the strong crosswind.

Where does textbook come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound of two older words. The first element, text, comes from the Latin textus, which literally meant 'something woven' and was built on the verb texere, 'to weave'; Roman writers used it as a metaphor for a passage of writing, the way words are woven together into a connected whole. English took text in through Old French in the 1300s, where it described the actual words of an author as distinct from any commentary on them. The second element, book, is a thoroughly native word from the Old English boc, a written document or record. The two were joined in the early 1700s to name a book containing the standard 'text' of a subject used for teaching, and from that the figurative adjective sense (a textbook example, meaning a perfectly typical one straight out of the manual) grew in the twentieth century. The spelling is simply the two parts stuck together, which is why the silent run of consonants in the middle, the x t b, can trip writers up.

How the word is built

• text (from Latin textus: a thing woven, a written passage)
• book (from Old English boc: written document)