Handwriting Evidence: Terminology

At the same time as the body was being archived by Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century, so handwriting itself was opened up to analysis and as evidence. One early handwriting expert, Professor Persifor Frazer of the University of Pennsylvania (a chemist and geologist), proposed a specific vocabulary for the newly emerging scientific study of documents and handwriting:

• ‘Bibliotics’ – the study of documents and their writing.
• ‘Grammapheny’ – the methods of determining the individual character of handwriting.
• ‘Plassopheny’ – the process of detecting fraud and forgery.

(Mnookin 2001, 1792)

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