codex
Americannoun
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codices
plural
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a quire of manuscript pages held together by stitching: the earliest form of book, replacing the scrolls and wax tablets of earlier times.
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a manuscript volume, usually of an ancient classic or the Scriptures.
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Archaic. a code; book of statutes.
noun
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a volume, in book form, of manuscripts of an ancient text
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obsolete a legal code
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of codex
1575–85; < Latin cōdex, caudex tree-trunk, book (formed originally from wooden tablets); cf. code
Explanation
A codex is an ancient book made of stacked, hand-written pages. A historian might study a medieval codex full of beautiful calligraphy and illustrations decorated with gold leaf. The ancient Romans invented the codex. When the codex first appeared as a way to bind a manuscript, it was a great improvement over previous methods. One of these was the scroll, a long roll of paper, and another was a wax tablet. Codex is a Latin word used to mean "book of laws," although it's literally "tree trunk." The plural of codex is codices.
Vocabulary lists containing codex
Aztec, Maya, and Inca Empires - Introductory
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Aztec, Maya, and Inca Empires - Middle School and High School
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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Ancient Aztec communities from the pre-Columbian period of Mesoamerica had a rich mythological codex that was also part of their ritual and sacrificial ceremonies.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 19, 2024
The pair turn into a tracking device when Venom fully manifests, and the codex can be destroyed only if one of them dies, so the story is essentially a chase movie through the American Southwest.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 24, 2024
The codex is on display at Christie's New York and will remain there until 9 April.
From BBC ● Apr. 4, 2024
A twelfth-century codex illustration shows the Byzantines using Greek fire to burn an enemy ship during a rebellion of the ninth century.
From Textbooks ● Apr. 19, 2023
The drawing at left, from a sixteenth-century codex, is a winter- count-like depiction of a year dominated by smallpox; two men lie dying or dead, their bodies spotted with pustules.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
They also used codices, book-like records drawn on bark paper that combined both images and pictograms.
From Textbooks ● Apr. 19, 2023
Starting from this perspective, Dr. Ezcurra and his co-authors present a calendar model that matches the location of the sun on the horizon to festivities cited in Mesoamerican codices.
From New York Times ● Dec. 13, 2022
Authors penned chivalric romances and heroic tales of knights battling fantastic monsters and traveling to exotic lands—think, Beowulf and King Arthur—by hand onto parchment and eventually paper codices.
From Science Magazine ● Feb. 16, 2022
Driggers cited Mexican-born American artist Enrique Chagoya, who evokes Maya codices — folding books of colorful glyphs — in his satirical “Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Theory of Everything.”
From Washington Post ● Aug. 4, 2021
In addition to taking slaves and booty, wartime victors in central Mexico often burned their enemies’ codices, the hand-painted picture-texts in which priests recorded their people’s histories.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
