Nowadays an anecdote might be described as a short, amusing account of some biographical incident. Samuel Johnson, after giving the matter some thought, included such a definition in his dictionary, although Boswell tells us that he didn't approve this meaning, considering it to be too French for his liking. He was wrong in that; this meaning appeared earlier in English than it did in French.
There was an older shade of meaning, and an interesting one. Procopius was a secretary of sorts, also a historian and general all-round sage at the court of the Roman Emperor Justinian at Constantinople. He died in A.D. 562 and might have gone to his reward before that had the emperor found out what he was up to. You see, apart from writing a book on his master's wars in North Africa and against the Ostrogoths in Italy, and another on the many great buildings erected by Justinian, including the church of Hagia Sophia, he had, under the bed, a third tome, titled Anekdota (Procopius wrote in Greek), meaning unpublished things.
Anekdota is ultimately from Greek an- "not" and ekdotos, "published". They were not published for very good reason. They contained juicy gossip about the Emperor and, as for his wife, Theodora, well, I won't make you blush: the less said the better. The beautiful Theodora had always been a bit of a mystery but Procopius spilled the beans on her by telling us that, far from being of noble birth, she was the daughter of a circus bear-tamer and had been an actress and a prostitute before being invited to the emperor's bed and, subsequently, to his throne.
This, Procopius's third book, was published after its writer's death, and it became very famous, needless to say. But English didn't borrow anekdota until the 17th century, and then from the Medieval Latin form, anecdota, and afterwards as anecdotes from the French. The first meaning in English was straight from Procopius, "unpublished things"; now anecdotes are merely amusing tittle-tattle about people. Anne Kelly from Clontarf asked about the word.
Another Kelly, John from Kinsale, asked about tuxedo, an American dress jacket. This item of clothing became fashionable around 1900 in Tuxedo Park, a resort built for the fabulously rich in southern New York State; the placename is a corruption of a Delaware Indian word, ptuksit, a wolf, one of the three totems of that nation, along with turtle and our Christmas friend, the turkey.
The Words We Use 3, a new collection of this column, has just been published by Four Courts Press at £6.95.