Online Encyclopedia
Make a correction
Your email address will not appear on the site. Note, comments may take some time to be approved.
Back to article:
LEDGER (from the English dialect forms liggen or leggen, to lie or lay; in sense adapted from the Dutch substantive logger)
Your email:
Article name:
Article content:
LEDGER (from the English dialect forms liggen or leggen, to lie or lay; in sense adapted from the Dutch substantive logger), properly a book remaining regularly in one place, and so used of the copies of the Scriptures and service books kept in a church. The New English Dictionary quotes from Charles Wriothesley's Chronicle, 1J38 (ed. Camden Soc., 1875, by W. D. Hamilton), " the curates should provide a booke of the bible in Englishe, of the largest volume, to be a lidger in the same church for the parishioners to read on." It is an application of this original meaning that is found in the commercial usage of the term for the principal book of account in a business house (see Boos-KEEPIVG). Apart from these applications to various forms of books, the word is used of the horizontal timbers in a scaffold (q.v.) lying parallel to the face of a building, which support the " put logs "; of a flat stone to cover a grave; and of a stationary form of tackle and bait in angling. In the form " lieger " the term was formerly frequently applied to a " resident," as distinguished from an "extraordinary" ambassador.