catalog

American  

[kat-l-awg, -og] / ˈkæt lˌɔg, -ˌɒg /

Or catalogue

noun

• catalogs
  plural

1. a list or record, as of items for sale or courses at a university, systematically arranged and often including descriptive material.

   a stamp catalog.

   Synonyms:

   record, register, roster

2. something that contains such a list or record, as a book, leaflet, or file.

3. a list of the contents of a library or a group of libraries, arranged according to any of various systems.

   Synonyms:

   record, register, roster

4. any list or record.

   a catalog of complaints.

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verb (used with object)

cataloged, catalogued, cataloging, cataloguing

1. to enter (items) in a catalog; make a catalog of.

verb (used without object)

cataloged, catalogued, cataloging, cataloguing

1. to produce a catalog.

2. to have a specified price as listed in a catalog.

   This model catalogs for $49.95.

3. to offer merchandise in a mail-order catalog.

adjective

1. of, relating to, or carrying on business through a mail-order catalog.

   catalog sales.

Usage

What does catalog mean? A catalog is a list or record of items. It is sometimes spelled catalogue. It commonly refers to a list of things being offered, such as items for sale or courses at a school. The point of such a catalog is typically to arrange the information in an orderly way—often with descriptions—so that the items can be easily found. The word often refers to a printed copy of the list, especially in the context of items available for purchase from a particular company. Catalog can also be used to refer to a collection of works, such as by a particular artist, as in I love every album in her catalog. A card catalog is a file containing information about the books and other materials held in a library. Card catalogs were once commonly physical cabinets of drawers containing cards but now often exist as online catalogs. Sometimes, catalog is used in a very general way as another way of saying list, as in a catalog of complaints. Catalog can also be used as a verb meaning to record items with a list, as in Please catalog all of the new titles. Example: The course catalog lists all of the classes that are available to take.

Synonym Usage

See list ¹.

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• cataloger
  noun
• catalogist
  noun
• cataloguer
  noun
• cataloguist
  noun
• miscatalog
  verb (used with object)
• miscatalogue
  verb (used with object)
• recatalog
  verb (used with object)
• catalogic
  adjective
• catalogical
  adjective
• catalogistic
  adjective
• noncatalog
  adjective
• noncatalogue
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• catalogs
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of catalog

First recorded in 1425–75; late Middle English cataloge, from Late Latin catalogus, from Greek katálogos “a register” (akin to katalégein “to count up”), equivalent to kata- “down, against, back” + -logos reckoning; see cata-

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Explanation

A catalog is a book that lists many things: the most common type of catalog is for a store. A catalog is an organized list that appears in book or pamphlet form. The Sears catalog tells you all the things you can buy at Sears, along with pictures of the items and what they cost. But you can also use catalog to mean any kind of listing. In an argument, you might say, "Why don't you just make a catalog of all my faults!" When you're making a catalog of any kind, you're cataloging.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

catalog catalogs cataloged cataloging catalogued cataloguing

"The Elvis Plaintiffs' iconic collective catalog contains some of the most groundbreaking, revolutionary, influential, and enduring musical compositions in human history," the case states.

From BBC ● Oct. 26, 2026

The owners of rights to much of Elvis Presley’s song catalog have sued Anthropic, claiming the artificial-intelligence giant used his songs without permission to train its online agent Claude.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 25, 2026

Bambino’s story is one of many amusing anecdotes recounted by Susannah Fullerton in “Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them,” a charming catalog of felines who have helped shape Western literature.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026

Its antenna arrays detect radio signals from celestial objects, allowing scientists to observe and catalog sources across the southern sky.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 12, 2026

She was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, and looking over the new Sears, Roebuck catalog.

From "October Sky" by Homer Hickam

“Retailers that successfully provide product catalogs, inventory feeds, merchant data, store information, reviews and other structured content to AI agents may gain a significant advantage,” the analysts said.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 5, 2026

Beyond pricing assistance, AI agents also search catalogs of products, build shopping carts and complete purchases on Shopify stores.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 5, 2026

QVC and HSN broadly welcome agents to complete purchases, proactively sending catalogs to companies like OpenAI and Google for AI visibility.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 2, 2026

"This infrastructure will take us from catalogs to cosmological interpretation," Eifler said.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 28, 2026

But soon all her earnings, from clerking at Dickson’s Pharmacy to waitressing at the Eat’n Park, were earmarked for a camera, and she spent hours poring over Mr. Wilkinson’s camera catalogs and photography magazines.

From "Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng

Currently, there are more than 17,000 active satellites in orbit, compared with around 1,000 a decade ago, said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who has cataloged every orbital rocket launch since 1957.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 2, 2026

The fossil, cataloged as MGB-512, is about 50 centimeters long and is housed at the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 15, 2026

To do so means overcoming obstacles that are cataloged with a discouraging ease: The apprenticeships, the unpaid hours, the creation of a style, the cultivating of clients, the marketing.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 1, 2026

“We got it cataloged immediately, which means someone can order it up in the reading room tomorrow, and that’s warp speed for us,” she added.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 1, 2026

But this seems unreasonable: modern libraries, after all, keep records of duplicate volumes, and their ancient counterpart was no less carefully cataloged.

From "Circumference" by Nicholas Nicastro

His repeated attempts to flex expensive restaurant bills and hardman tough talk land like a waterlogged handkerchief after he’s spent song after song cataloging all the specific ways we’ve all hurt his feelings.

From Salon ● May 21, 2026

He left 15 years ago and has spent much of the time since cataloging how he thought the institution was going astray.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026

The surge of immigration detention flights at Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport spurred plane spotter Nick Benson to shift from tracking rare and unusual aircraft to cataloging the removal of detainees from Minnesota.

From Barron's ● Jan. 29, 2026

In 2013, von Konrat led a team of botanists and volunteers to survey the region, cataloging grasses, trees, and mosses in search of a location that matched the plant material found on the shoes.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 1, 2026

Once she’d found half a dozen, she went to Harry Dibdin at the Bodleian Library with another cataloging query.

From "The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage" by Philip Pullman

"Once again, there was no early warning from our partners," Zelensky said, as he catalogued the damage, deaths and injuries.

From Barron's ● Oct. 19, 2026

Emergency services in Catalonia said they received more than 850 calls related to the downpours and catalogued over 500 incidents.

From BBC ● Sep. 17, 2026

Marshall in 2024, catalogued the system’s due process pathologies and all but invited a broader challenge.

From Slate ● Jul. 28, 2026

Three hundred years later, Gray’s Anatomy by Henry Gray reinforced the impression that the body had finally been catalogued, indexed and neatly organized – a system mapped and fully explained.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 21, 2026

While he catalogued each element of the circus in shaky handwriting, he could not manage to record his encounter with the red-haired girl.

From "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern

The document was uncovered by a volunteer in February while cataloguing the papers of Royal Navy captains from the American Revolutionary War.

From BBC ● Jul. 2, 2026

Buyers and sellers are seeing the biggest differences compared with last year in West Palm Beach, which saw a near-40% increase in pending sales, Redfin data cataloguing the nation’s largest metropolitan areas show.

From Barron's ● May 26, 2026

“The cataloguing and photographing of the notebook was a valid part of the inventory search,” he wrote.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 18, 2026

A graduate program in archival science at Pratt helped him gather focus, while turning him on to the infinite history of sound data and cataloguing.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 8, 2025

Stopping before the narrow garage, he sniffed the fumes from Paradise with great sensory pleasure, the protruding hairs in his nostrils analyzing, cataloguing, categorizing, and classifying the distinct odors of hot dog, mustard, and lubricant.

From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole

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Related Words

• book
• catalogue
• file
• inventory
• list
• prospectus

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