‘give out, publish’. The use of the pluralanékdotaby the 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius as the title of his unpublished memoirs of the life of the Emperor Justinian, which revealed juicy details of court life, played a major part in the subsequent use of Latinanecdotafor ‘...
Originally, anecdote referred to unpublished writings (as of history or biography); the usual preferred plural form was anecdota, as found in the Greek from which the word is borrowed. The Greek word was formed by combining the negative prefix a- to the verb ekdidonai ("to publish"). ...