A single thing in a list, collection, or group. It can be a physical object or just one point or idea being discussed.
From Latin “item,” meaning “also” or “likewise,” used in lists to introduce another entry. In medieval documents, “item” marked each new point, and over time it came to mean the individual point itself. That’s how a word meaning “also” turned into a word for “one thing on a list.”
Every time you see a numbered list of items, you’re seeing the ghost of medieval scribes who wrote “item, item, item” down the page. The word didn’t originally mean “thing” at all; it just meant “also.” Eventually people started treating the “also” itself as the name of each entry.
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