First recorded in English in 1845, in the singular, in the Quarterly Review, a London journal of essays and reviews. The reviewer described an altar screen whose drawing was made by scratching off the upper coat to show the black layer beneath. This word is the plural.
Italian was using a verb for scratching by the thirteenth century and a noun for the scratch by the fourteenth. Behind them, probably, lay the Latin word for a stylus, the pencil of the ancient world. English later borrowed the noun's smaller form.
In Greek, the source verb began as 'to scratch', the way a stylus marks a clay tablet. From the scratch came 'to draw', and then 'to write'. The verb itself goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root, *gerbh-, whose descendants reach English by a second road, through the Germanic languages.
CARVE and CRAB are both said to trace to a root meaning 'to scratch'. CARVE descends from Old English ceorfan, 'to cut', and is the English cousin of the Greek verb for writing. CRAB descends from Old English crabba, and belongs with Germanic words for scratching and clawing.
In 1851 it named the scratchings found in the ruins of Pompeii. In 1863 the Scottish archaeologist Daniel Wilson gave the same name to runes that Vikings cut in the twelfth century inside Maeshowe, a 5,000-year-old tomb in Orkney. By 1877 it had moved to crude drawings made in public places. In 1992 the Economist, writing of the footballer Kevin Keegan's standing on Tyneside, quoted an old example: 'Jesus saves, but Keegan scores on the rebound'.
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