means A place—or collection—where books and other materials are gathered, organized, and made available for reading, reference, or borrowing.

from From Latin librarium, 'a chest for books,' built on liber, meaning 'book'—though liber first meant the inner bark of a tree, the very stuff people once wrote on before paper. So buried in the word is a small forest: every library is, etymologically, a stack of peeled bark. The Latin traveled into Old French as librairie and arrived in English in the late Middle Ages. (Curiously, French librairie now means 'bookshop'—they kept liber for selling, while bibliothèque, from Greek biblion, 'book,' covers the lending kind.)