chapter

From Middle English chapitre, borrowed from Old French chapitre, from Latin capitulum, meaning a chapter of a book (and in Medieval Latin, a synod or council). Capitulum was itself a diminutive of caput, meaning 'a head.'

The word carried a double life in Medieval Latin, naming both a section of writing and a gathering of church officials — a sense still faintly visible in phrases like 'chapter meeting' for a religious or organizational body.

It shares its root with capital and capitulum, and is a doublet of chapiter — all tracing back to Latin caput, 'head.'