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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
Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 7 July 2025
Perkins Coie was one of six law firms targeted by Trump, having long drawn his ire for advising Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign and working with an opposition research firm tied to the discredited Steele dossier.
—Ella Lee, The Hill, 30 June 2025
Photo: Courtesy of Converse The impetus for the new collection came just over a year ago, when Tyler headlined Coachella and created a dossier of printouts from the back catalogue to give a presentation to the Converse team.
—Riann Phillip, Vogue, 27 May 2025
Max Zorin's dossier reads something like this: his birth was the result of Nazi medical experimentation on pregnant women.
—EW.com, 24 May 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Dossier.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dossier. Accessed 21 Jul. 2025.
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dossier
noun
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