Word.ws English Dictionary

scribes

scribes is the plural of scribe.

Meaning of scribe

Noun

scribe (plural scribes)

  1. Someone who writes; a draughtsperson; a writer for another; especially, an official or public writer; an amanuensis, secretary, notary, or copyist.
    • [T]he pleasure of writing on wax with a stylus is exemplified by the fine, flowing hand of a Roman scribe who made out the birth certificate of Herennia Gemella, born March 128 AD.2013 September 14, Jane Shilling, “The Golden Thread: the Story of Writing, by Ewan Clayton, review [print edition: Illuminating language]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review), page R28
    1. A person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession.
      • The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone,[…]. Scribes, illuminators, and scholars held such stones directly over manuscript pages as an aid in seeing what was being...2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist
  2. (informal) A journalist.
  3. (archaic) A writer and doctor of the law; one skilled in the law and traditions; one who read and explained the law to the people.
  4. A very sharp, steel drawing implement used in engraving and etching, a scriber.

See all 11 meanings of scribe

Phrases with scribes

Words that rhyme with scribes

Questions about scribes

What is scribes the plural of?
Scribes is the plural of scribe.

Words near scribes in the dictionary

  1. scribely
  2. scriber
  3. scriber block
  4. scriber blocks
  5. scribers
  6. scribes
  7. scribeship
  8. scribeships
  9. scribess
  10. scribesses
  11. scribing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scribes (page history and authors); scribe (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “scribes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scribes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.