library

Etymology

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. 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.

noun

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.
   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[.] 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light:Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, page 11
   When all else fails, give up and go to the library. 2012, Stephen King, 11/22/63, page 133
2. (by extension) Any institution that lends out its goods for use by the public or a community.
3. A collection of books or other forms of stored information.
   A small library of books has been written on the subject. 1896, Alfred Newton, A Dictionary of Birds, page 71
   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. 2008-05-15, Alberto Manguel, “A 30,000-Volume Window on the World”, in New York Times
4. An equivalent collection of analogous information in a non-printed form, e.g. record library.
5. A room dedicated to storing books.
6. (programming) A collection of software routines that provide functionality to be incorporated into or used by a computer program.
   Coordinate term: framework
   A static library is much like any other library in that it contains a bunch of code for your application to use. 2014, John Paul Mueller, Jeff Cogswell, C++ All-in-One For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, page 307
7. (genetics) A collection of DNA material from a single organism or relative to a single disease.
8. (card games) 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). 1994, The Magic, the Gathering: Pocket Players' Guide, page 167
   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! 2006, Michael J. Flores, Deckade: 10 Years of Decks, Thoughts, and Theory!, page 228
   To win a game of Magic, you must achieve one of two chief goals: either be the first to reduce your opponent's life total from 20 to 0, or force him or her to attempt to draw a card from his or her library when there are no cards left in it. 2006, John Kaufeld, Jeremy Smith, Trading Card Games For Dummies, page 50
   The deck becomes the draw pile, also called the library, from which each player repeatedly draws cards for his or her own hand, cards that are gradually included into the game. 2010, Shirley R. Steinberg, Michael Kehler, Lindsay Cornish, Boy Culture: An Encyclopedia, page 418
   At this phase, most of TCGs only allow players drawing card(s) from a pack which is also called library or deck. 2010, Zhigeng Pan, Maiga Chang, Adrian David Cheok, Transactions on Edutainment III, page 119