Glosses To The Bible - Explanatory Glosses

Explanatory Glosses

The words which were commonly the subject of explanatory glosses may be reduced to the following five classes:

• foreign words;
• provincial dialectical terms;
• obsolete words;
• technical terms; or
• words employed in some unusual sense or in some peculiar grammatical form.

Where these glosses consisted of a single explanatory word, they were easily written between the lines of the text or in the margin of manuscripts opposite the words of which they supplied the explanation. In the process of time the glosses grew in number, and in consequence they were gathered in separate books where they appeared, first in the same order of succession as they would have had if written in the margin of the codices, and ultimately in a regular alphabetical order. These collections of glosses thus formed kinds of lexicons which gave the concrete meaning of the difficult words of the text and even historical, geographical, biographical, and other notices, which the collectors deemed necessary or useful to illustrate the text of sacred writings.

A lexicon of the kind is usually called a glossary (from Lat. glossarium), or just "gloss". From a single explanatory word, interlined or placed in the margin, the word gloss has been extended to denote an entire expository sentence, and in many instances even a running commentary on an entire book.