katalogos

Greek kata meant down or thoroughly and legein meant to gather or to choose. Katalogos meant a list, a register — something assembled completely and completely set down. Homer used katalogos in the Iliad's second book for the famous enumeration of the Greek forces at Troy: ships, commanders, home cities, contingent sizes. The list runs to 265 lines and was likely a separate oral tradition incorporated into the epic.

The Romans absorbed the word as catalogus, a register or list. Medieval Latin kept it for library inventories and commercial lists. When Johannes Gutenberg's printing press made book production scalable in the 1450s, catalogue became the word for the list of what a library or bookseller held. The Stationers' Company in London published some of the first book catalogues in the 1590s.

Mail-order catalogues reshaped commerce from the 1870s onward. Montgomery Ward's 1872 catalogue — a single-sheet price list — was the origin of what became a 540-page publication by 1884. Sears Roebuck's catalogue, starting in 1893, was nicknamed the 'Wish Book' and became the primary commercial interface for millions of rural Americans who had no department stores nearby.

The catalogue has migrated to screens without changing its function. Amazon is a catalogue. Netflix is a catalogue. The word has survived from Homer's military roster to the streaming platform because the core act — assembling a complete list and setting it down — has not changed.