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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
Michael T. Nietzel, Forbes, 14 Mar. 2025
During the 2016 campaign, Perkins Coie lawyers worked with Fusion GPS, which was connected to the Steele dossier, which contained unflattering allegations about Trump and his connections to Russia.
—Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill, 11 Mar. 2025
The job of harnessing that outrage, the argument went, will get easier once Trump inevitably hands his critics a full dossier of second-term over-reach.
—Philip Elliott, TIME, 24 Feb. 2025
But the dossier was not the root or the start of the investigation.
—Charlie Savage, New York Times, 23 Jan. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Dossier.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dossier. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
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dossier
noun
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