press [OE] Both press and print [ME] can be traced back to Latin premere, ‘to press’, as can pressure [LME]. Journalists and the newspaper industry have been known as the press, in reference to printing presses, since the late 18th century, although before that a press was a printing house or publisher. Another name for journalists, used since the 1830s or 1840s, is the fourth *estate. It was originally used of the then unrepresented mass of people. By the middle of the 19th century it was firmly established for the press. Carlyle wrote in 1841 ‘Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters’ Gallery…there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all.’ Burke has been credited with the term, but no evidence beyond Carlyle has yet been found. Press the flesh is US slang from the 1910s meaning ‘to shake hands’. These days it is generally used of celebrities or politicians greeting crowds by shaking hands with random people. The heyday of the press gang, a group employed to force men to join the navy, was the 18th and early 19th centuries, but the first record of the term comes before 1500. Press-ganging people was really a form of arbitrary conscription, a word that appears in Late Middle English in the literal sense of ‘writing down together’ from Latin con ‘with’ and scribere ‘write’, with the modern sense appearing in 1799. Depress [LME] has the basic sense of ‘press down’.