"syllabus": Syllabus began life as a printer's error in a 15th-century
edition of Cicero's Epistles to the Atticans. In this work Cicero had
written "indices . . . quos vos Graeci . . . sittubas appelatis," meaning
"indexes, which were called sittubas by the Greeks." The printer
misprinted "syllabos" for "sittubas" and syllabos, later slightly changed
to syllabus (instead of sittubas), became a synonym for index. Its meaning
of index or table of contents was later expended to mean "an outline or
other brief statement of a discourse, the contents of a curriculum, etc."
Source: The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert
Hendrickson
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