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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."
Examples of dossier in a Sentence
Kazem Kazerounian, Hartford Courant, 29 May 2025
As the cardinals of the Catholic Church go into conclave to elect the next pope, many of them are reading a dossier that lists the statements their brother cardinals have made on climate change, allowing women into the diaconate, and the status of the Latin Mass.
—Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 7 May 2025
Trump has also railed against Elias, one of the firm's former lawyers who hired an opposition research firm that in turn commissioned former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to produce a dossier examining ties between Trump and Russia.
—Khaleda Rahman, MSNBC Newsweek, 6 May 2025
The lack of information, even with the help of archives and La Rocca’s assorted dossiers, was a problem for Robert Nieri.
—Nick Miller, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Dossier.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dossier. Accessed 4 Jun. 2025.
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dossier
noun
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