scribe

plural scribes

1. Someone who writes; a draughtsperson; a writer for another; especially, an official or public writer; an amanuensis, secretary, notary, or copyist.

   Pay records, supply logs, discharge certificates: all needed scribes, and those who could write might have found themselves being spared the worst of the drudgery.

   2025 July 15, James Osborne, “Could you have survived as a Roman soldier? Here's the surprising truth about life in the ancient army”, in History Extra, archived from the original on 15 Jul 2025

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   [T]he pleasure of writing on wax with a stylus is exemplified by the fine, flowing hand of a Roman scribe who made out the birth certificate of Herennia Gemella, born March 128 AD.

   2013 September 14, Jane Shilling, “The Golden Thread: the Story of Writing, by Ewan Clayton, review [print edition: Illuminating language]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review), page R28

   1. A person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession.

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      The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone,[…]. Scribes, illuminators, and scholars held such stones directly over manuscript pages as an aid in seeing what was being written, drawn, or read.

      2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist

2. informalA journalist.
3. archaicA writer and doctor of the law; one skilled in the law and traditions; one who read and explained the law to the people.
4. A very sharp, steel drawing implement used in engraving and etching, a scriber.

present singular third person scribes · participle present scribing · participle past scribed · past scribed

1. To write.
2. To write, engrave, or mark upon; to inscribe.

   he scribed his name on the mould, and wrote it on the two pieces of pasteboard

   1812, anonymous author, The Trial

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   There—at Ioue wexed wroth, and in his ſpright / Did inly grudge, yet did it well conceale; / And bade Dan Phœbus Scribe her Appellation ſeale.

   c. 1597–1598, Edmund Spenser, “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie: […]. Book VII, Canto VI.”, in The Faerie Queene, […], London: […] H[umphrey] L[ownes] for Mathew Lownes, published 1609, →OCLC, stanza 35, page 356

   There was the curious fascination expressed regarding the triangular relationship between the poor white, the black, and the hookworm — suggesting a desire to differentiate and segregate the poor white body from that of the black and to scribe more boldly what was often, for the poorest people of the South, a very thin line.

   2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 121

3. To record, as a scribe.
4. To write or draw with a scribe.
5. businessTo cut (something) in order to fit it closely to an irregular surface, as a baseboard to a floor which is out of level, a board to the curves of a moulding, etc.
6. To score or mark with compasses or a scribing iron.