Origins
The English word 'scripture' entered the language in the early thirteenth century, borrowed through Old French 'escriture' from Latin 'scriptura.' The Latin word means simply 'a writing' — anything that has been written — formed from 'scriptus' (the past participle of 'scribere,' to write) and the suffix '-ura' (denoting the result or product of an action). In classical Latin, 'scriptura' could refer to any piece of writing: a letter, a document, a composition.
The dramatic narrowing of this word's meaning is one of the clearest examples of semantic specialization in the history of English. Where Latin 'scriptura' meant 'any writing,' English 'scripture' came to mean almost exclusively 'sacred writing' — the holy texts of a religion, and especially the Christian Bible.
This narrowing happened in stages. In Late Latin, early Christian writers began using 'Scriptura' (often as 'Sacra Scriptura,' Holy Scripture) as a technical term for the texts they regarded as divinely inspired — the Hebrew Bible and, gradually, the New Testament writings. By the time the word entered Old French and then English, the religious sense was already dominant, though the general sense of 'any writing' lingered into the fifteenth century.
Latin Roots
The contrast with French is instructive. French 'écriture' descends from the same Latin 'scriptura' but retained the broad meaning. In modern French, 'écriture' means 'writing' in general — handwriting, literary style, the act of writing. The poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida made 'écriture' a central term in his work on language and meaning. English 'scripture,' by contrast, is so strongly associated with the Bible that using it to mean 'writing' in general would sound strange or deliberately archaic.
When capitalized as 'Scripture' or 'the Scriptures,' the word refers specifically to the Bible in Christian usage. Other religions have adopted the term by analogy: one speaks of Hindu scriptures, Buddhist scriptures, Islamic scripture (the Quran). In comparative religion, 'scripture' has become the generic English term for any body of text regarded as sacred or divinely inspired.
The Latin root 'scribere' from which 'scripture' ultimately derives is one of the great word-forming elements in the English language. The past participle stem 'script-' generated 'scripture,' 'script,' 'manuscript' (written by hand), 'postscript' (written after), 'transcript' (written across), and 'conscript' (enrolled, written together). The present stem 'scrib-' produced the entire family of '-scribe' verbs: describe, inscribe, prescribe, subscribe, transcribe, circumscribe, proscribe, and ascribe.
Proto-Indo-European Roots
German 'Schrift' (writing, script, font) offers an interesting parallel. Though it comes through the Germanic branch rather than directly from Latin, it ultimately traces to the same PIE root *skrībh- (to cut, scratch). 'Die Heilige Schrift' (the Holy Scripture) is the standard German term for the Bible, showing the same semantic narrowing as English 'scripture.' Both words began as general terms for writing and were captured by religious usage.
The material history of scripture — the physical production of sacred texts — connects the word back to its etymological roots in a particularly vivid way. Before the invention of printing, every copy of the Bible was a manuscript (literally 'written by hand'), produced by scribes (from 'scribere') who inscribed (wrote upon) parchment or vellum using the techniques of calligraphy and illumination. The great medieval scriptoria (writing rooms) where monks copied sacred texts were factories of 'scriptura' in the most literal sense — places where the act of writing was performed as a sacred duty.
In contemporary English, 'scripture' retains its religious core meaning but has also developed a figurative extension. One might speak of 'the scriptures of modernism' or describe a founding document as 'scripture' for a particular movement. This figurative use draws on the connotations of authority, reverence, and canonical status that the word has accumulated through eight centuries of primarily religious application.