'Scripture' meant any written text before narrowing to mean sacred writings, especially the Bible.
The sacred writings of a religion, especially (when capitalized) the Bible; any body of writing considered authoritative or foundational.
From Proto-Indo-European *sker-/*ker- ("to cut, to scratch") via Latin scriptura ("a writing, a written composition"), from scriptus (past participle of scribere, "to write, to scratch") + the abstract noun suffix -ura. Scripture shares its PIE root *sker- with script, scribe, and ultimately with scar and score (notching and cutting marks). Latin scriptura was a general term for any piece of writing. It entered ecclesiastical Latin as the standard term for the sacred writings — Sacra Scriptura (Holy Scripture) — in
French 'écriture' and English 'scripture' are the same word — both descend from Latin 'scriptura.' But they diverged in meaning: French kept the general sense of 'writing' (as in Jacques Derrida's 'De la grammatologie' on écriture), while English narrowed the word almost exclusively to sacred texts. In French, your handwriting is your 'écriture'; in English, that would sound like your personal Bible.
Words closest in meaning, ranked by similarity