: a file containing detailed records on a particular person or subject
the patient's medical dossier
Police began compiling a dossier on him.
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Gather together various documents relating to the affairs of a certain individual, sort them into separate folders, label the spine of each folder, and arrange the folders in a box. Dossier, the French word for such a compendium of spine-labeled folders, was picked up by English speakers in the 19th century. It comes from dos, the French word for "back." The verb endorse (which originally meant "to write on the back of") and the rare adjective addorsed ("set or turned back to back," a term primarily used in heraldry) are also derived, via the Anglo-French endosser and French adosser respectively, from dos. The French dos has its origins in the Latin dorsum, a word which also gave English the adjective dorsal ("situated on the back"), as in "the dorsal fin of a whale."
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the WebThe reason didn’t find its way into any obituaries, but Mikhail Gorbachev helped prime this columnist to be skeptical when the Steele dossier surfaced three decades later. Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 13 Sep. 2022 The Associated Press first reported on the dossier without identifying the author.cleveland, 4 Apr. 2022 Among the issues Durham is reportedly scrutinizing is how allegations of Trump-Russia coordination from Steele's dossier were used in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment's appendix. Jerry Dunleavy, Washington Examiner, 19 Aug. 2020 As this blog has pointed out, outlets including MSNBC, CNN and McClatchy glommed onto evidence-free allegations in the Steele dossier, lending a baseless boost to the collusion narrative. Erik Wemple, Washington Post, 19 July 2022 Igor Danchenko, a Russian national linked to the Steele dossier, still faces Durham charges. Bart Jansen, USA TODAY, 31 May 2022 In some editions Tuesday, the name of law firm Perkins Coie was misspelled as Perkins Cole in a Page One article about the Steele dossier.WSJ, 11 May 2022 Alongside costumes and makeup, her trunks held Paillole’s dossier, written in invisible ink among the notes on Baker’s sheet music. Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, 8 Aug. 2022 The notion of a dossier appears to have been conceived by an attorney for litigation purposes.Fox News, 27 June 2022 See More
Word History
Etymology
French, bundle of documents labeled on the back, dossier, from dos back, from Latin dorsum — see dorsalentry 2