重写本——刮掉旧字再写新字的羊皮纸，旧文总会隐隐透出来；引申指一切层层覆写、旧迹未消的东西。 A parchment scraped and written over, the old text ghosting through — and, by extension, anything overwritten in layers that never quite erase.
A parchment scraped and written over, the old text ghosting through — and, by extension, anything overwritten in layers that never quite erase. 重写本——刮掉旧字再写新字的羊皮纸，旧文总会隐隐透出来；引申指一切层层覆写、旧迹未消的东西。
词源etymology
希腊语 palin（再）＋ psaō（刮）——「再刮一次」。 一个词的本义就是一道工序：羊皮纸太贵，旧书刮掉，新书写上。
Greek palin (again) + psaō (to scrape) — “scraped again.” The word’s literal sense is a workshop procedure: parchment was dear, so the old book was scraped off and the new one written on top.
背景the story
刮得再干净，旧字的底稿（行话叫 scriptio inferior，「下层文字」）也会随岁月泛上来—— 于是重写本成了双重文献：面上一本书，底下压着另一本。
最著名的一册是阿基米德重写本：十世纪抄下的阿基米德著作，十三世纪被僧侣刮掉、 裁开、改抄成祈祷经书。1998 至 2008 年，学者用多光谱成像把底层一点点唤醒， 找回了几近失传的《方法论》——祈祷书底下，睡着两千年前的数学。 从此这个词放开了引申：城市是重写本，记忆是重写本，人也是。
However clean the scraping, the under-writing (the trade’s scriptio inferior) seeps back up with age — so a palimpsest is a double document: one book on the surface, another pressed beneath.
The most famous copy is the Archimedes Palimpsest: a tenth-century transcription of Archimedes, scraped, cut and rewritten as a prayer book by thirteenth-century monks. From 1998 to 2008, scholars coaxed the lower text awake with multispectral imaging and recovered the nearly lost Method — two-thousand-year-old mathematics asleep under the prayers. Since then the word has extended freely: cities are palimpsests, memories are, people are.
中文里的邻居neighbors in chinese
汉语没给它立词——纸便宜，中国抄书人少有刮洗重写的必要。 但经验遍地都是，只是载体换了：中国的重写本是墙。 老墙上标语盖着标语，最底下一层的字总在雨后洇出来； 北京的二环压着城墙，城墙压着护城河。物是同一件，词悬着没造。
Chinese never minted the word — paper was cheap, and Chinese copyists rarely needed to scrape and rewrite. But the experience is everywhere, on a different medium: China’s palimpsest is the wall. Slogans painted over slogans, the bottom layer bleeding through after rain; the Second Ring Road pressed over the city wall, the wall over the moat. The thing is identical; the word was left unminted.
The city is a palimpsest — ring roads over city walls over dynasties, every layer leaking through. 自拟例句 our own example, not a quotation Her diary became a palimpsest of handwriting styles, each year's script scraping over the last girl's. 自拟例句 our own example, not a quotation 词典词（MW／OED），正式与学术写作通用；文献学里是术语， 文化批评里是最耐用的隐喻之一——注意别用成万金油，它的力气在「旧迹透出来」那一层。
A dictionary word (MW/OED), good in formal and academic prose; a technical term in textual scholarship and one of cultural criticism’s hardest-working metaphors — just don’t let it go generic: its muscle is in the layer that bleeds through.