Nuts and Bolts: gazetteer.

Is your local newspaper called a gazette? Mine is.

In Britain, as well as being a newspaper, a gazette can be a publication which lists official appointments. That's why an army officer here is said to be gazetted when he takes up his new rank.

A gazetteer is a book, or a bit of a book, that's a bit like an index, except that it only lists and describes places.

The word gazette is quite likely to come from the Italian word for magpie. 


photo by Luis Garcia (Zaqarbal)

It's quite easy to imagine how a word for magpie came to mean a word for a compilation of some kind. 

But it didn't happen in the way you'd imagine.

Word To Use Today: gazette. This English word appeared in the 1600s from France. Before that it came from the Italian gazeta, which was a news-sheet costing a gazet, a small Venetian copper coin. In turn the coin might be named after a gaza, a magpie, which word comes from the Latin gaia, a jay.