label is a slip or tag attached to something to identify it and, by extension, a word or phrase that names, describes, or classifies a person, thing, or idea; as a verb, to label is to attach such a name.
The word carries a literal and a figurative life side by side. Literally, a label is the paper, cloth, or sticker fixed to an object to state its contents, owner, destination, or price. Figuratively, it is the descriptive term itself — "introvert," "startup," "vintage" — applied to sort something into a category. A third common sense names a brand, most familiarly a record label, the company under whose name music is released.
It entered English around 1300 from Old French label, a ribbon or strip of cloth, probably of Germanic origin and related to lap in the sense of a loose flap. Its earliest English uses were heraldic, naming a narrow band across a coat of arms, and later the strip attached to a document to carry its seal. The general sense of a tag stating what something is arrived in the seventeenth century; the verb followed around 1600, and its figurative meaning, to categorize, dates from the mid-nineteenth century.
A label differs from a name in that it classifies rather than singles out, and from 📝nomenclature, which is the governing system of names within a field. Sociology's labeling theory, associated with Howard Becker, argues that applying a label such as "deviant" can shape the behavior it claims only to describe. A related critique runs through 📝Labeling the World, drawn from 📝Charles Eisenstein: the habit of naming categories can blind us to the singular thing in front of us.
Much of this library began as a label: 📝Sticky Note Chic named an aesthetic a Redditor gifted me, and 📝low frequency is what I call anything unconscious of the Self. Labels also expire — I retired 📝The Journey To One once its name argued against the truth it pointed to.