Conference

The Latin verb conferre combined com, meaning together, with ferre, meaning to carry or to bear.1 The word described the act of bringing things together for the purpose of comparison or deliberation. In classical Latin, the same verb could mean to compare, to consult, or to bestow.

Medieval Latin turned the verb into a noun. Conferentia appeared in the fifteenth century to describe the act of consulting together, a contribution, or a discussion.2 French adopted it as conférence, and English borrowed it from French around 1550.

The earliest English sense, recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1538 in a dictionary by Thomas Elyot, described an act of consulting together.3 By the 1580s, the word had shifted to mean a formal meeting for consultation, discussion, or exchange of opinions.

The original Latin conferre also produced the English abbreviation cf., still used in academic writing to mean compare. The same root that meant to bring together now fills conference rooms, fills calendars, and fills the agendas of industries built around gathering people who could have compared notes in a letter.

The sports usage arrived around 1900, when leagues began grouping teams into conferences for scheduling. The telephone conference call emerged in the 1930s.4 Video conferencing followed in the late twentieth century. Each new technology repackaged the same Latin verb, carry it together, into a format the previous generation could not have imagined.

The word conference shares its root with the verb confer, which in the 1560s gained the sense of bestowing a gift or honor. A university confers a degree. A monarch confers a title. Carrying something together, in Latin, could mean carrying knowledge to a room or carrying distinction onto a person.5