A history of the term kirillica

Modern Slavic, Romance, and Germanic terms for the Cyrillic script trace their origins to the early Croatian form *kürillica / *kurillica, first attested in Latin documents from Dubrovnik and Kotor as chiuril(l)iza and curiliza. Initially, this Croatian term referred to the Glagolitic script. A semantic shift occurred in the late 13th century, wherein *chiuriliza (< ćurilica) came to denote the Cyrillic script. This development was influenced by the Medieval scholarly tradition that attributed the creation of the Glagolitic script to St. Jerome, leading to its Latin designation as alphabetum Hieronymianum. Consequently, St. Cyril the Philosopher came to be regarded as the inventor of the Cyrillic script, which was then referred to in scholarly Latin as alphabetum Cyrillianum (or Cyrillicum, Cyrilliacum). Under the influence of late medieval Latin scholarship, modern European terms for the Cyrillic script emerged. Variants such as chiuril(l)iza appeared in the writings of European humanists, Enlightenment thinkers, and early Romantic scholars working in Italian, English, French, and German. From Italian—and later German—the term KIRILLICA was borrowed into Russian. Ukrainian and,
likely, Bulgarian adopted the term from German, whereas Serbian ćirilica reflects a direct continuation of the Croatian form. Slovak and early Polish terminology, by contrast, derive from the substantivized Latin form cyrillica.