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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
Shannon Bond, NPR, 28 Apr. 2025
Perkins Coie, which has long drawn Trump’s ire for advising Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign and working with an opposition research firm tied to the discredited Steele dossier, was targeted in an executive order early last month.
—Ella Lee, The Hill, 23 Apr. 2025
Trump brought a data protection lawsuit against Orbis Business Intelligence over allegations in a dossier written by its co-founder, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, but Trump's claim was thrown out last year.
—USA Today, 3 Apr. 2025
The Canary Mission, a hard-line pro-Israel group, compiled an exhaustive online dossier cataloging his activism, with screenshots of his social media pages and selective quotes from his speeches on campus and media interviews.
—Anvee Bhutani, New York Times, 17 Apr. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Dossier.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dossier. Accessed 16 May. 2025.
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dossier
noun
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