“To publish is to make public — the word comes from Latin publicus, and for most of history, the act of publishing required permission from someone who could say no.”
Latin publicāre meant 'to make public, to confiscate for public use.' It comes from publicus (of the people), from populus (people). The word entered Old French as publier and English as 'publish' by the fourteenth century. To publish was simply to make something known. Town criers published news. Priests published banns of marriage. The word had nothing to do with printing — printing had not been invented in Europe yet.
Gutenberg's press changed what publishing meant. After 1455, publishing increasingly meant producing printed copies of a text for sale. The Stationers' Company in London, chartered in 1557, controlled who could publish what. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, maintained by the Catholic Church from 1559 to 1966, listed books that were forbidden. Publishing required a license, and the license could be revoked. The word 'publish' carried the weight of state and church censorship for centuries.
The Statute of Anne (1710) created the first copyright law, giving authors rather than printers control over their works. This shifted the meaning of 'publish' from 'to make public with permission' to 'to distribute a copyrighted work.' The publisher became a specific kind of business — a company that selected, edited, printed, and distributed books. The word narrowed from any act of making public to a specific industry.
The internet destroyed that narrowing. Self-publishing, blog publishing, social media publishing, publish-or-perish in academia. Anyone with an internet connection can publish anything. The word has returned to its Latin meaning: to make public. No gatekeeper required. No license needed. Publicāre — making something belong to the people — is once again what the word literally does.
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Today
The publishing industry generates about $26 billion in annual revenue in the United States alone. Five major publishers — Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster — control most of the traditional market. But Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing allows anyone to publish an e-book in minutes. The gatekeepers still exist, but the gate has a back door.
The word has come full circle. Latin publicāre meant 'to make public.' Medieval publishing required permission. Modern publishing requires a keyboard. The democratization is real, and so is the noise it produces. When everyone can publish, the problem shifts from access to attention. The word stayed the same. The bottleneck moved.
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