Index

​When you look up something in an index, do you use your index finger? Did you know that the practice of putting an index in a book was once quite controversial?
 
The word index has its origins in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) deik (to show) and Latin indicare (to point out) from Latin in- (into, in, on, upon) + dicare (to proclaim). The Latin word index, meaning one who points out, discloser, informer; forefinger; pointer, sign, title, list—literally, ‘anything which points out’—comes from indicare.
 
Book-related indexes began to appear in the early medieval period of Western Europe. “The index was … part of an entire range of organizational and reading tools conceived in the 13th century” related to the development of universities and to the growth of religious orders focused on preaching.
 
The word ‘index’ appears in English in the late 14th century with same meaning as Latin index.
 
If you are going to provide an index for a book, then the book needs page numbers. The first use of page numbers in books is seen as early as the 1470s but was not common until later in the 16th century.
 
In the early 16th century, Conrad Gessner, an advocate of indexing in books, wrote, “Indexes are the greatest convenience to scholars, second only to the truly divine invention of printing books by movable type… truly it seems to me that, life being so short, indexes to books should be considered as absolutely necessary by those who are engaged in a variety of studies” (cited by Dabhoiwala, 2023, 8).
 
Index, meaning the alphabetical list of a book’s contents with directions where in the text to find them, is from the late 16th century. The ancient Greeks were the first to alphabetize items when making lists. However, this was not commonly done in Western Europe until the early 16th century until a book was published providing directions on how to alphabetize items. The first English dictionary to be alphabetized was published in 1604.
 
The use of index to mean a list of forbidden books is from 1564 (the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe). The Index Expurgatorius, a catalogue of books that Catholics were forbidden to read unless certain passages were deleted, was first printed in 1571. [As we know, knowledge does not exist unless it is found in a book!].
 
The term ‘index finger’ is first recorded in 1768.
 
Index, in the scientific sense (e.g., refractive index) is from 1829. The economic sense of index (e.g., cost-of-living index) is from 1870.
 
In the early days of book publishing, there was no clear distinction between a ‘table of contents’ and an ‘index’. Only in the last 200 years has the standard definition and usage of these terms become commonly applied; i.e., a table of contents is found at the beginning of a book and an index is found at the end.
 
Today, Dabhoiwala writes, “Like every widely observed change in reading and learning habits before and since (the invention of writing, the launch of Internet search engines, the spawning of ChatGPT), the spread of the index was accompanied by anxiety that flighty, superficial modes of accessing information were supplanting ‘proper’ habits of reading and understanding … Every social and technological shift affects how we read … each demands a different kind of attention” (Dabhoiwala, 2023, 8).
 
Image: https://blog.reedsy.com/index-in-a-book/
 
Reference: Online Etymological Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
Dabhoiwala, F. (2023, June 22). Life is short. Indexes are necessary. [Review of the book Index, A History of the: A bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age, by Dennis Duncan.] The New York Review of Books, page 6 – 8.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/22/life-is-short-indexes-are-necessary-dennis-duncan/