incunabula

Definitions  ·  Examples  ·  Pronunciations  ·  Etymologies  ·  Related  ·  Statistics  ·  Comments (2)  · 
Mr. Gordon Duff's great work on the English incunabula, 'Fifteenth

View all »
Definitions (3)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (3)

  1. The cradle or early abode; the place in which a thing had its earliest development, as a race, an art, etc.; hence, first trace; beginning; origin. It is also in Orissa, if anywhere, that we may hope to find the incunabula that will explain much which is now mysterious in the forms of the temples and the origin of many parts of their ornamentation. J. Fergusson, Hist. Indian Arch., p. 435.
  2. In ornithology, a breeding-place; the resort of a bird to breed.
  3. In bibliography, books printed in the infancy of the art; generally, books printed before the year 1500: in this sense rarely with a singular incunabulum. Including such rare works as 430 Incunabula, from a. d. 1469 to 1510. Cat. Union Theol. Sem., 1882–3.

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet

Toggle elsewhere links Elsewhere on the web

View all »
Examples (50)

  • The collections, ranging from 15th century continental incunabula, to 17th century English civil war tracts, plus key 18th and 19th century historical, literary, religious and geography sources, are a spectacular international research resource, befitting a European capital city library. —  Archivalia
  • These truly remarkable collections include a notable collection of rare atlases; a good cross-section of 'incunabula' (i.e. early books printed in Europe pre-1501); an important collection of early printed Bibles; key English and European texts from the Protestant Reformation; a substantial collection of scarce political tracts from the Civil War; rare books on natural history, geography, and so on, and so on. —  Archivalia
  • We're fortunate to know how those people with sedentary jobs in the middle ages coped, due to the survival of illustrations in incunabula (early printed books from before 1500), and the large number of drawings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts (inserted deliberately to assist memorisation). —  Simple Talk rss feed
  • These are generally rare books, such as incunabula and the higher class English literature of the seventeenth century, and are to be found in the libraries of wealthy collectors who are also learned men. —  The Book-Hunter at Home
  • Mr. Gordon Duff's great work on the English incunabula, 'Fifteenth Century Books,' was issued by the Bibliographical Society in 1917. —  The Book-Hunter at Home
 

Tags

Sign up or sign in to add tags.

Stats

This word has been looked up 117 times.

On Twitter

Photos from

flickr images

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Latin, neuter plural, cradle-clothes, swaddling-clothes, hence a cradle, birthplace, origin, from in, in, + cunabula, neuter plural, cradle, diminutive of cunæ, fem, plural, a cradle. Cf. cunabula.
 

Pronunciations
Record your own »

If you'd like to prod us on getting a pronunciation for this word, sign in (or sign up) and let us know.

Charts

frequency chart

Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year

Bubble height: used more or less than expected, vs. all uses evenly distributed

We are still working on calculating this word's frequency.

Recently looked up

scuttling · germs · sapper · ovarian · gerbils

Recent Favorites

pygopagus · sanglant · Astacus · sweetbread · qualms

Recent Pronunciations

eu oi oìa u ou e u oìa · the octopi are dry · Kansas City · spell it rite · put it in your pocket