In Aristotle’s Poetics, “gloss” (Greek glōssa; Lat. glossa, verbum peregrinum, verbum gentilium; New Lat. glosa; French glose; Italian glossa) denoted an archaic or dialectal word used by a poet as literary embellishment. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian characterized a gloss as the type of word through which barbarolexis (“a barbarizing expression”) was realized. However, in his Etymologiae of around 600, Isidore of Seville no longer saw a gl…