Stereotype printing is pressed into the story of The New York Times.
In Word Through The Times, we trace how one word or phrase has changed throughout the history of the newspaper. Aluminium Foil Coil
The word “stereotype” first appeared in The New York Times in 1858. A young man, The Times reported, had been arrested “on a charge of stealing $300 worth of stereotype plates.”
The invention of stereotype printing — a method in which metal plates are used to transfer text and images to a page — is often attributed to William Ged and dated to 1725, though it may have emerged earlier. According to the historian George A. Kubler, the word was not coined until later, at the end of the 18th century, by the French typesetter Firmin Didot.
“‘Stereo’ is the ancient Greek word for ‘solid,’ and ‘type’ is ‘symbol,’” Adam Aleksic, the linguist behind the Instagram account @etymologynerd, said in an interview. These “solid symbols,” he added, increased printing efficiency.
Thanks to its speed, stereotype printing became popular with newspapers, including The Times, which relied on the method to update later editions of the paper. In 1959, a fire in The Times’s “stereotype room” temporarily interrupted production of the first edition of the next day’s newspaper. The Times managed to report this in the same day’s paper. The fire had started in the “stereotype foundry, where metal page plates for printing presses are cast.” (It was extinguished immediately.)
Stereotype printing made it easy to produce the same page over and over again. So, throughout the 1800s, “stereotype” gained a figurative meaning: “something continued or constantly repeated,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That gave way to another definition, per the dictionary, which arrived in the early 1920s: “a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.”
“Stereotype,” in this figurative sense, first appeared in The Times in a 1925 film review: “The director has kept the picture from being a stereotype,” the author wrote. “He has used brains and imagination.”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
6063 Aluminum Sheet Suppliers Want all of The Times? Subscribe.