Anybody who knows a smattering of French might hazard a guess that our word
magazine has got '
magasin ' (shop or store) somewhere in its ancestry, and they'd be right, though the French took it from the Italian '
maggazino ' (storehouse) which in turn was derived from the Arabic word '
makazin ', and all before the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
So when and why did a word meaning shop or storehouse get appropriated as the name for a printed publication? And not any sort of publication, for a magazine is different from a journal, a newspaper, ...
