The word "library" in other European languages

Post Reply New Topic

Spanish, French, Italian, and plenty of other European languages have a word that looks and sounds similar to English "library", but in those languages it means what we would refer to as a "bookstore", not what we call a library.

For some reason through language evolution "library" in English got the meaning it did which is not shared with other languages with a similar sounding word.

In Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Danish) apparently the word for bookstore is always something like "bookhandel" (according to Google translate).. But yes...in Romance languages "library" is usually something like "biblioteca" (Spanish), and book store resembles our word "library".