Offices and paperwork

Eighth on this list is compilare, and English owns the very same verb without the meaning that matters here. Both languages took it from Latin compilare, which meant to snatch things together and carry them off, to plunder. Out of that grew the sense of gathering material and heaping it into a book, and that is the sense « compile » kept: a dictionary is compiled, a report is compiled from other people’s figures. Italian kept that job too — compilare un dizionario is perfectly ordinary — but it then gave the verb a second one English never gave it. At a counter, compilare is to fill a form in. Compili il modulo in stampatello asks for block capitals in the boxes, and ho compilato tutto tranne l’ultima riga says that one line is still blank. Nothing is being gathered and nothing is being assembled there; the paper already exists and the pen is only going into the gaps. « Fill in » is the English for it, and a reader who hears « compile » behind compilare imagines a far larger task than the one being asked for.