— A name with a history —
Incipor
Incipit liber primus…
"Here begins…" The opening words of medieval manuscripts, written by scribes to identify a work before title pages existed.
— Etymology —
Where the name comes from
Incipor is an invented word, drawn from the Latin verb incipere ("to begin") and its third-person present singular form, incipit — literally "(it) begins."
For most of book history, books didn't have title pages. They had incipits — opening lines, often illuminated, that named the work and signalled its start. A scribe would write Incipit liber primus de civitate Dei… ("Here begins the first book of The City of God…"). Catalogers indexed manuscripts by their first words, not their authors. The incipit was both a beginning and an identification.
A book-authoring app is, almost literally, a tool for writing incipits. The first words of a chapter, the first sentence of a manuscript, the first time a character speaks — every one of them is an incipit in miniature. The name picks up that thread.
— A practical note —
How to say it
Pronunciation: in-SIP-or. Three syllables, stress on the second. Same vowels as the Latin root, English-ified for a modern app.
— The connection —
Why it fits the product
Most writing apps are named after the act of typing, the artefact of the file, or the metaphor of a folder. Incipor is named after the moment a writer starts a chapter — the smallest, most charged unit of authorship. That's the moment the app exists for.
The medieval incipits also carried a quiet promise: they assumed a reader would take the work seriously enough to find it among hundreds of others on a shelf. Incipor is built for writers who take their own work that seriously.
Ready to begin?
Incipor is in active development. Coming soon to the Mac App Store.