Tome

How to spell tome

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tome

What does tome mean?

1. nounA large, heavy, and usually serious or scholarly book.

Tome in a sentence

• The professor lugged a dusty tome on medieval law to the lecture.

• The dictionary was a thousand-page tome that barely fit on the shelf.

Where does tome come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek tomos, which literally meant 'a piece cut off' or 'a section', from the verb temnein, 'to cut'. In the world of ancient writing, a long work was copied onto a papyrus roll, and a single roll formed one cut-off section of the whole, so tomos came to mean one physical volume of a larger work. Latin took this in as tomus, and English borrowed it during the 1500s, at first meaning simply one volume of a multi-volume set. Over time the sense narrowed in flavour, so that today a tome suggests a single book that is large, weighty, and often scholarly. The same Greek root for cutting survives in words such as 'anatomy' (a cutting up) and 'atom' (something that cannot be cut), which is a useful reminder that the silent final 'e' caps off a short, Greek-derived word.

How the word is built

• tome (from Greek tomos: a section or roll cut from a larger work)