I’m sure you’ve met people who save past copies of magazines likeNational Geographic in some kind of personal warehouse. People who collect like this are behaving in an etymologically appropriate way at least.
Urbandictionary.com, tells me that a magazine is “a
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controlling device used by corporate America to brainwash teenaged girls.”
The word magazine appeared on this earth long before people were reading periodicals. Its ultimate ancestor was an Arabic word kazana meaning to “store up” whose sister word makazan, meaning “storehouse” was adopted into a number of languages including Latin and then French, where English got it from.
According to the OED, in Spanish the word also existed but they then stuck the Arabic al on the front meaning “the warehouse.”
This is similar to our use of the words alcohol and algebra, both of which have prefixes that could have been left off since all the al means is “the.”
Thus when magazine entered English in 1583 it arrived with the meaning of a “storehouse.”
This meaning we can still recognize, particularly relating to military storage areas, but otherwise this usage has pretty well been eclipsed by the magazines we read.
The storage of small items in a case, such as bullets in a clip or music CDs in a cartridge, take their name from the old meaning; but we developed these applications of the word right here in English around 1677, and the French had to adopt it back from us.
Similarly it was in English that a bundle of pages sold at a news stand first became known as a magazine in 1731 when the Gentleman’s Magazine, explained its own title thus: “This Consideration has induced several Gentlemen to promote a Monthly Collection to treasure up, as in a Magazine.”
This meaning too was later adopted back into French and other languages.
Somehow magazines fall into a lower tier of sorts in that a periodical is thought of as aimed at an academic audience while a magazine is aimed at the general public.
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