Kything is derived from the Old English kythe, cýðe; a word known from both The Vespasian Psalter (c.825) and the West Saxon Gospels (c.1025). Meaning "to announce, proclaim, declare, tell, to make known in words, to manifest, to make visible", it survived as the Scottish dialect word kythe. The author Madeleine L'Engle used the word kythe to describe a fictional type of communication, in a sense like telepathy, found in several of the books in her Time Quartet. L'Engle reportedly discovered the term in "an old Scottish dictionary" belonging to her grandfather.