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''scribe'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260718130800-00-⌔

scribe - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

scribe (plural scribes)

• Someone who writes; a draughtsperson; a writer for another; especially, an official or public writer; an amanuensis, secretary, notary, or copyist.
  • ✤ [T]he pleasure of writing on wax with a stylus is exemplified by the fine, flowing hand of a Roman scribe who made out the birth certificate of Herennia Gemella, born March 128 AD.¹
  • A person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession.
    • ✤ 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.²
• (informal) A journalist.
• (archaic) A writer and doctor of the law; one skilled in the law and traditions; one who read and explained the law to the people.
• A very sharp, steel drawing implement used in engraving and etching, a scriber.

Verb

scribe (third-person singular simple present scribes, present participle scribing, simple past and past participle scribed)

• To write.
• To write, engrave, or mark upon; to inscribe.
  • ✤ There—at Ioue wexed wroth, and in his ſpright/Did inly grudge, yet did it well conceale;/And bade Dan Phœbus Scribe her Appellation ſeale.³
  • ✤ he scribed his name on the mould, and wrote it on the two pieces of pasteboard⁴
  • ✤ There was the curious fascination expressed regarding the triangular relationship between the poor white, the black, and the hookworm — suggesting a desire to differentiate and segregate the poor white body from that of the black and to scribe more boldly what was often, for the poorest people of the South, a very thin line.⁵
• To record, as a scribe.
• To write or draw with a scribe.
• (carpentry) To cut (something) in order to fit it closely to an irregular surface, as a baseboard to a floor which is out of level, a board to the curves of a moulding, etc.
• To score or mark with compasses or a scribing iron.

Pronunciation

• IPA: /skɹaɪb/
  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: [skɹaɪ̯b]
  • (US) IPA: [skɹaɪ̯b], [skɹɑɪ̯b]
  • (Canada) IPA: [skɹaɪ̯b], [skɹəjb]
  • (Australian, New Zealand) IPA: [skɹɑe̯b]
  • (Standard Southern British) IPA: [skɹɑjb]
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Rhymes: -aɪb

Etymology 1

From Middle English scribe, from Old French scribe (“scribe”), from Late Latin usage of scrība (“secretary”) (used in the Vulgate Bible translation to render Ancient Greek γραμματεύς (grammateús, “scribe, secretary”), which had been used in its turn to render the Hebrew סופר (“writer, scholar”)) from scrībere (“to write, draw, draw up, draft (a paper), enlist, enroll, levy; orig. to scratch”), probably akin to scrobs (“a ditch, trench, grave”).

Etymology 2

From Middle English scryben (“to write”), from Latin scrībō (“to write”).⁶⁷ Doublet of shrive.

The carpentry sense comes from the way a workman uses a compass to mark a line before cutting.

Printed 2026-07-18.

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Footnotes

1. 2013 September 14, Jane Shilling, “The Golden Thread: the Story of Writing, by Ewan Clayton, review [print edition: Illuminating language]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review) ‎${}^{[1]}$, page R28: ↩

2. 2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist: ↩

3. c. 1597–1598, Edmund Spenser, “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie: […]. Book VII, Canto VI.”, in The Faerie Queene, […], London: […] H[umphrey] L[ownes] for Mathew Lownes, published 1609, →OCLC, stanza 35, page 356: ↩

4. 1812, anonymous author, The Trial: ↩

5. 2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 121: ↩

6. “scribe, v.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007. ↩

7. “scribe, v.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000. ↩

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