library

noun

Etymology: From Middle English librarie, from Anglo-Norman librarie, from Old French librairie, from Latin librarium (“bookcase, chest for books”), from librarius (“concerning books”), from liber (“the inner bark of trees; paper, parchment, book”), probably derived from a Proto-Indo-European base *leub(ʰ)- (“to strip, to peel”). Displaced native Middle English bochous, bokhus (literally “book house”), from Old English bōchūs (compare bookhouse). Romance cognates often mean “bookshop” instead: French librairie, Italian libreria, Spanish librería, Romanian librărie and Portuguese livraria. This is a relatively recent innovation (16th century in French), which ended up displacing the earlier sense.

1. An institution which holds books and/or other forms of media for use by the public or qualified people often lending them out, as well as providing various other services for its users.

   “She went to exchange her books at her local library.”

   “Libraries have been burnt and whole religious movements wiped out because their belief and myths have been considered to be of dubious origin by the upholders of orthodoxy[.]”

2. Any institution that lends out its goods for use by the public or a community.

   “You can check out a bandsaw from the tool library.”

3. A collection of books or other forms of stored information.

   “A small library of books has been written on the subject.”

   “My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time.”

4. A collection of information or reference materials not in book form.

   “She has the most impressive record library I've ever seen.”

   “At his office in Copenhagen's Amager neighborhood, Thulstrup maintains a vast materials library, arranging samples and mock-ups on tables as tactile mood boards.”

5. A room dedicated to storing books.
6. A collection of software routines that provide functionality to be incorporated into or used by a computer program.

   “A static library is much like any other library in that it contains a bunch of code for your application to use.”

7. A collection of DNA material from a single organism or relative to a single disease.
8. The deck or draw pile.

   “At the conclusion of every duel, each player must show the remaining cards in his or her hand to the opponent to verify that no Restricted List duplicate cards appear there (e.g., to prove that a second Time Walk wasn't drawn from his library).”

   “But why did very good players shy away from cards that are so obviously good from our perspectives? One very real possibility is that library manipulation/increased selection and redundancy tech had not yet been established - after all, many players were amazed at Lestree's use of the Sylvan Library to draw extra cards!”