codex-, codi-, cod-

The barcode was adopted in the 1970s because the bars were easier for machines to read than optical characters.

Barcodes' main drawbacks are that they don't identify unique items and so scanners have to have "line of sight" to read them.

Etymology: Latin codex, codic, "tree trunk, wooden tablet, book", a variant of caudex, "tree trunk".

Codex is a variant of caudex, a wooden stump to which petty criminals were tied in ancient Rome, rather like our stocks. This was also the word for a book made of thin wooden strips coated with wax upon which one wrote.

The usual modern sense of codex, “book formed of bound leaves of paper or parchment,” is due to Christianity. By the first century B.C., there existed at Rome notebooks made of leaves of parchment, used for rough copy, first drafts, and notes. By the first century A.D., such manuals were used for commercial copies of classical literature. The Christians adopted this parchment manual format for the Scriptures used in their liturgy because a codex was easier to handle than a scroll and because one could write on both sides of a parchment but on only one side of a papyrus scroll.

By the early second century all Scripture was reproduced in codex form. In traditional Christian iconography, therefore, the Hebrew prophets are represented holding scrolls and the Evangelists holding codices.

The study of a codex or an older handwritten book. It is closely related to palaeography, the study of handwriting in older manuscripts, and to philology, the study of language and culture in older texts. All three originated in Classical Latin and Greek studies, but they were later extended to the Medieval studies, and then to manuscripts, and books from other pre-modern cultures and time periods.