The English word ‘list’ has a complicated etymology. Two related planes of usage converge to give us the modern sense of ‘catalogue or roll consisting of a row or series of names, figures, words, or the like’ (c. 1604). Both come from the French liste, itself an adaptation of the Old high German lista. The first plane of usage (c. 1300) denotes ‘border, edging, strip’. It later (c. 1450) came to more specifically describe the selvage or edge of a piece of cloth, or indeed any strip of cloth (such as those used to filter or drip a liquid). Extending out from cloth, the word came to describe, c. sixteenth century, any line or band conspicuously marked on a surface—a line in a man's beard, a stripe of colour, or a scar. The second and closely related meaning, that of boundary or border, was also widely adopted in the sixteenth century, e.g. the ‘Primer of 1559’: ‘The miserable captives, which as yet be hedged in within the lists of death,’ or Shakespeare in King Henry V: ‘Dear Kate, You and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion: we are the makers of manners, Kate […].’ From here come the ‘lists’ of battle. This second sense more forcefully implies lists as containing rather than the more general line or strip of earlier usage. But both early meanings of ‘list’, as border and as boundary, demonstrate that the term has always been used to describe various cultural techniques of collection and separation.

Though form is clearly emphasized in this history of usage, much of the small but insightful literature on modern practices of listing focuses on content. Most argue the basic premise that lists establish or entrench configurations of power, dictating not just how and who may judge, but the very ontology of discussion; as Werbin notes, the list serves. Others disagree, pointing to autobiographical lists as a site of emergent identities and subjectivities. These latter remain focused on the performance of self that occurs through list contents, e.g. the expression of one's sophisticated taste and cultural capital through a personally-curated top-10 list.