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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
Leah Marilla Thomas, Vulture, 31 Mar. 2024
In 2018, Viganò released a bombshell dossier calling on Francis to resign and accusing the pope of knowing about allegations of abuse of trainee priests carried out by the former cardinal of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, and failing to act.
—Christopher Lamb, CNN, 5 July 2024
My credit dossier unfolded before my eyes: eight versions of my name, 12 addresses, two employers, and a whopping 25 credit accounts, stretching back to the George W. Bush administration.
—Daniel De Visé, USA TODAY, 26 May 2024
Data brokers aggregate this data from hundreds of sources to build dossiers on each one of us and sell that data to anyone willing to pay, which is one of the large expenses for most political campaigns.
—Ken Colburn, The Arizona Republic, 23 June 2024
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“Dossier.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dossier. Accessed 26 Jul. 2024.
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dossier
noun
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