The word “stereotype” first appeared in The New York Times in 1858. A young man, The Times reported, had been arrested “on a charge of stealing $300 worth of stereotype plates.”
The invention of stereotype printing — a method in which metal plates are used to transfer text and images to a page — is often attributed to William Ged and dated to 1725, though it may have emerged earlier. According to the historian George A. Kubler, the word was not coined until later, at the end of the 18th century, by the French typesetter Firmin Didot.
“‘Stereo’ is the ancient Greek word for ‘solid,’ and ‘type’ is ‘symbol,’” Adam Aleksic, the linguist behind the Instagram account @etymologynerd, said in an interview. These “solid symbols,” he added, increased printing efficiency.
Thanks to its speed, stereotype printing became popular with newspapers, including The Times, which relied on the method to update later editions of the paper. In 1959, a fire in The Times’s “stereotype room” temporarily interrupted production of the first edition of the next day’s newspaper. The Times managed to report this in the same day’s paper. The fire had started in the “stereotype foundry, where metal page plates for printing presses are cast.” (It was extinguished immediately.)
Stereotype printing made it easy to produce the same page over and over again. So, throughout the 1800s, “stereotype” gained a figurative meaning: “something continued or constantly repeated,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That gave way to another definition, per the dictionary, which arrived in the early 1920s: “a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.”
“Stereotype,” in this figurative sense, first appeared in The Times in a 1925 film review: “The director has kept the picture from being a stereotype,” the author wrote. “He has used brains and imagination.”
Over the last century, the meaning of the word has remained, but its connotation has changed. “Stereotype” underwent pejoration, in which a word gradually adopts a negative meaning, Mr. Aleksic said. “When someone generalizes too much about another group of people, that can often be racist or discriminatory,” he added.
In recent years, The Times has written about “confronting,” “breaking” and “fighting” stereotypes, including those related to race, religion and gender. (Even “‘positive’ stereotypes can become dangerous,” an article from 1998 pointed out.)
Today, the more “oblique sense” of the word, the etymologist Jess Zafarris said, is more common than the literal meaning. “Now, when you say the word ‘stereotype,’” she said, “you don’t think of printing.”
That’s perhaps true — if you don’t work at a printing plant. Mike Connors, the managing director of the production department at The Times’s printing plant in Queens, said in an interview that when he started in 1976, The Times still used stereotype plates. “Now it’s archaic,” he said. “Then, it was chic.”
The Times currently uses a process Mr. Conners called “computer to plate”; instead of a heavy, lead-based plate, a laser burns digital images onto aluminum plates, each one representing a page of the newspaper. These plates are attached to the press, and ink begins to flow.
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