enkyklios paideia

Greek enkyklios meant circular or general, and paideia meant education or child-rearing. Enkyklios paideia was the well-rounded general education that Greek society considered the foundation of citizenship — what we might now call a liberal arts education. The Roman author Quintilian used the phrase in his 1st-century CE work Institutio Oratoria, the definitive text on Roman education.

The compound word encyclopaedia appeared in Latin around the 16th century, when Renaissance scholars began compiling comprehensive reference works. Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, written in 77 CE, is sometimes called the first encyclopedia: 37 books covering geography, anthropology, zoology, botany, medicine, and art. Pliny himself never used the word — it was applied retroactively.

Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert launched the Encyclopédie in Paris in 1751 — the project that gave the word its modern political weight. Their encyclopedia was explicitly radical: it treated knowledge as secular, human, and revisable. Louis XV tried to suppress it. The Catholic Church condemned it. It ran to 28 volumes and changed European intellectual life.

Wikipedia exists in direct descent from the Encyclopédie's premise: that human knowledge can be collectively compiled, organized, and made freely available. The Greek enkyklios — circular — describes something that never ends. Knowledge that feeds back into itself, that has no final volume.