University of Mississippi

Defining Words  

Definitions of the magazine abound. Pulitzer Prize winning historian Frank Luther Mott 

credited England’s 

The London Gentleman’s Magazine 

of 1731 as the first publication to use 

magazine

 in its title, a word derived from the French word 

magasin

, meaning storehouse or 

warehouse of goods. Many American pioneer publications were called 

miscellanies

, alluding to a 

storehouse with its collection of odds and ends designed to attract the entire family. Mott defined 

the magazine as a “bound pamphlet issued more or less regularly and containing a variety of 

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reading matter.”

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Journalism scholar

 

James Playsted Wood’s “perishable” magazine was 

“essentially a compromise between the newspaper and the book, [it] lacks the permanence of the 

book but has much more than the highly transient value of the newspapers.”

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The magazine is a

 

conduit for communication among people and a medium for sharing 

facts, ideas, and fancies. Wood attributes to periodicals 200 years of affecting American social, 

political, and economic thought while disseminating information and opinions, and reporting 

commenting, advising, and entertaining. 

Directly, through discussion of contemporary interests, and indirectly, through fiction and 

verse, they have influenced both the life of the nation and the lives of millions of 

individuals. They have made their influence felt in government, commerce, and industry. 

They have stimulated the minds and imaginations of American readers, formed many of 

their ideas, affected their actions, fashioned their ethical and social concepts, as well as 

their clothes and their homes.

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