Word of the Week – Catalog

As someone who studied Ancient Greek in college, I occasionally get excited when I realize that an English word has its roots in that language…and especially when it’s a logos word.

Why? Because logos might mean “word” most specifically, but it means SO MUCH MORE. The logos of things comes up a lot in ancient philosophies. The Biblical Greek word for blessing is a logos word, for example. And of course, the Gospel of St. John begins with Christ as The Word, the logos, through whom all of creation was made.

I had never, however, drawn the connection between catalog and logos, perhaps because I usually favor the British spelling, catalogue. It’s been in the English language since the 1400s, always with the same meaning of “a list of items.” But my husband pointed out recently that’s literally “according to [kata] + the word [logos].” That just struck me as cool. Because a catalog is indeed a word-list of something, and that very word-list is what gives it order. Given that the logos is the thing by which the whole universe was ordered, that’s just cool.

And while I’m not physically the most organized person in the world, I’ve come to really love my catalogs of things like books, especially the ones I’ve read in a year. In 2025, I also started an actual TBR list, with pages for each genre. Do you keep a catalog of anything?

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