“Scroll” Entymology…”Scroll” has no family connection with roll, although roll is largely responsible for its present-day form. Etymologically it is actually the same word as shred. Both go back to a prehistoric Germanic *skrautha ‘something cut’. This evolved in a straight line to give English shred, but it was also borrowed through medieval Latin scrōda into Old French as escroe, where its meaning ‘cut piece, strip’ narrowed to ‘strip of parchment’. Its Anglo-Norman version escrowe was acquired by English, where it split in two. It survives in full as escrow [16], a legal term for a sort of deed, but a shortened form, scrow, also emerged, and association with roll (in the sense ‘roll of parchment’) led to its being altered to scrowle or scroll.
