‘Index’: the word, its history, meanings and usages

If you are asked at a wine and cheese party (these are now becoming more popular, at least in the United States, than cocktail parties) what your profession or hobby is, and you answer proudly, 'I am an indexer', you may, depending on the background of your inquirer, be assumed to be a mathematician, a physicist concerned with optics, an anthropologist, a paleontologist, a geologist, an economist, a mechanical engineer, a forestry expert or a computer scientist; or possibly even a printer, a designer of playing cards, an employee of a motor vehicle licensing agency; or, of course, a person who tries to make the contents of books and journals retrievable by listing names and subjects in a predictable order, with an indication of their physical place in the source—in brief, an indexer of the kind that is most likely to read these lines. (Conversely, if you were applying for a credit card, stating your profession as 'indexer', you might be rebuffed by a terse computer-printed note, 'No such occupation', as happened recently to an acquain tance of mine.)