Peter,
Any idea of when "syllabus" first began to be used as the outline of the material to be used in a college course?
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Smagorinsky
To: Recipient list suppressed
Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2000 8:40 AM
Subject: today's fun fact
"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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