Word Facts: Album

In 1968, the Beatles released their famous “White Album“.  That title is actually an exercise in redundancy.  The word “album” means, literally, “a blank slate” (from the Latin “albus“, “white.”  In time the meaning came to include a blank bound book in which photographs or other materials could be kept; and eventually its meaning was further extended to mean a blank disk on which sound was recorded.  The term “record album” dates back to the ancient times of 1957 when people actually listened to albums.