“The word for the most common writing tool on earth comes from the Latin word for 'little tail' — because Roman brushes were made from animal hair tufted at one end.”
Latin penicillus is the diminutive of peniculus, meaning 'brush,' itself a diminutive of penis, meaning 'tail.' A penicillus was a little tail — a small, tufted paintbrush. The word entered Old French as pincel (paintbrush) and arrived in English as 'pencil' by the fourteenth century, still meaning a fine artist's brush. The graphite writing instrument was not invented until the sixteenth century. When it appeared, it borrowed the existing word for a thin marking tool.
In 1564, a large deposit of pure graphite was discovered at Borrowdale in the Lake District, England. Locals found that the black mineral left marks on sheep — useful for counting — and then on paper. They wrapped graphite sticks in string or sheepskin. The first wooden-cased pencils appeared in the late sixteenth century, probably in Nuremberg, Germany. The Faber family began manufacturing them there in 1761. The graphite was called 'black lead' for centuries, even after the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele proved in 1779 that it was carbon, not lead.
Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a French officer, solved a supply problem during the Napoleonic Wars by inventing a process to mix ground graphite with clay and fire it in a kiln. This produced pencils of varying hardness — more clay meant harder leads, more graphite meant softer, darker marks. The Conté process, patented in 1795, is still the basis of pencil manufacturing today. Every pencil in the world uses a variation of a Napoleonic-era invention.
The pencil's other etymological offspring is penicillin. Alexander Fleming named his antibiotic in 1928 after the Penicillium mold's brush-like spore structures — penicillus, the little tail, the little brush. The same Latin word produced both the writing instrument and the drug that saves millions of lives. The brush, the pencil, and the antibiotic are all named for a tuft of hair on a Roman tool.
Related Words
Today
About 14 billion pencils are manufactured worldwide each year. Most are made from incense cedar wood, filled with Conté-process graphite-clay cores, and painted yellow — a tradition started by the Koh-I-Noor company in 1890 to associate their pencils with the premium Siberian graphite that was a golden-yellow color. The yellow pencil is a marketing decision that became a universal default.
The pencil is the only common writing instrument that lets you erase. This has philosophical implications that pen enthusiasts enjoy pointing out. A pencil mark is provisional. It can be undone. The Latin penicillus — the little tail, the little brush — named something small and impermanent. Two thousand years later, the impermanence is the pencil's greatest feature.
Explore more words