The Greek Words Behind Every Auction Catalog

Anyone who has paged through a sale catalog in New York or Palm Beach has been reading ancient Greek without noticing it. According to The Collector, words like "theory," "analysis," "hypothesis" and "category" are more than borrowed vocabulary: they carry a way of reasoning that first took shape in ancient Greece. For collectors, whose work runs on sorting objects into categories and testing a hypothesis about where a piece came from, that habit of mind is part of the daily routine. The same discipline that makes a good catalog note makes a good collection.

With reporting from The Collector.