magazine [L16th] The first magazines were storehouses, often for ammunition and provisions for war. The word comes from Italian magazzino and goes back to Arabic. From the mid 17th century books providing information useful to particular groups of people often had magazine in their title. The use for a periodical publication providing a range of stories and articles developed from this: the first was The Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Monthly Intelligencer, launched in 1731. Military uses of the word developed at the same time. A container for holding a supply of cartridges to be fed automatically into the breech of a gun came to be called a magazine in the 1860s.