When The Beatles released their ninth studio album in November of 1968, its proper name was simply "The Beatles." The all-white cover was designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, an admirer of the provocative minimalism of Marcel Duchamp.
The name "The White Album" was probably first dreamed up by journalists and fans to avoid confusion, just as Peter Gabriel's first three solo albums (all named "Peter Gabriel") are nicknamed "Car", "Scratch" and "Melt" according to their sleeve designs. How soon the more wordily nerdy intervened, I don't know, but I've been listening The White Album for nigh on 20 years now before realizing the following..
The name "White Album" is redundant. The word "album" comes from the Latin route word "albus" which means "white."
Early uses of "album" were colloquial variations on "albus" and meant "blank" instead of white. Thus the first uses of the word "album" as a thing, rather than a description of a thing, were used to describe blank things to be filled like sheets of paper. As technology progressed, so did adaptations of the word "album" which adopted to mean something used to hold memorabilia, writings like poems and essays and photographs.
It's easy then to see how "album" again transformed itself to mean "a collection" of songs when that definition first showed up in 1957. As it turns out, "album" became the term of choice for a record due the appearance of a record jacket resembling a blank book, to be filled by the music inside.
(Learned with gratitude, from Podictionary "The Podcast for Word Lovers" (subscribe) that I recommend highly.)
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles edited and compiled by Jeff Martin. Essay by me on page 45.
