manuscript
/ˈmæn.jəˌskɹɪpt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.92 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Handwritten, or by extension manually typewritten, as opposed to being mechanically reproduced.
noun
A book, composition or any other document, written by hand (or manually typewritten), not mechanically reproduced.
noun
A single, original copy of a book, article, composition etc, written by hand or even printed, submitted as original for (copy-editing and) reproductive publication.
Example Sentences
- "We read in history, that the beauty of an ancient manuscript tempted King Alfred, when a boy at his mother's knee, to learn the letters of the Saxon tongue."
- "In the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. He never read me any of his manuscripts, […], and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned."
- "The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone,[…]. Scribes, illuminators, and scholars held such stones directly over manuscript pages as an aid in seeing what was being written, drawn, or read."
- "The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy."
Etymology
1597, from Medieval Latin manūscrīptus, a calque of Germanic origin, equivalent to Latin manū (ablative of manus (“hand”)) + Latin scrīptus (past participle of scribere (“to write”)). Not found in Classical Latin.
Word Breakdown
- Root: manūscrīptus, manūscrīptum