markup
markup
English
“Before markup meant profit margin, it meant the physical marks a printer made on a manuscript to guide the typesetter.”
Markup entered English in the 1870s as a printing term. Editors and compositors marked up manuscripts with handwritten annotations—instructions for typesetters about font size, spacing, and layout. These marks were literally marks placed upon the text. The practice was old, but the compound noun was new.
The commercial meaning followed within a decade. By the 1880s, American retailers used markup to describe the amount added to the wholesale cost of goods to set the retail price. A 50 percent markup on a $10 item made it $15. The metaphor transferred cleanly: just as a printer added marks to a manuscript, a merchant added cost to a product.
The two meanings coexisted peacefully until 1969, when Charles Goldfarb at IBM invented a system called Generalized Markup Language. GML evolved into SGML, which begat HTML in 1993. Tim Berners-Lee's HyperText Markup Language brought the printing term into the digital age. Every webpage on the internet is a marked-up document.
Today the printing sense is nearly extinct—few manuscripts are marked up by hand. The commercial sense thrives: markup is how every business makes money. And the computing sense has consumed the word entirely for a generation of programmers who have never handled a blue pencil.
Related Words
Today
Markup is the space between what something costs and what someone pays. It exists in every transaction, visible or not. The printing origin is fitting: markup is annotation, a layer of meaning added on top of the raw material.
The web runs on markup. Commerce runs on markup. The word names the oldest business practice in a language simple enough for a child to understand: you add something to what was already there.
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