There’s a word for everything, including the hobby of collecting cheese labels: tyrosemiophilia. A person who does it is a tyrosemiophile.

Where the word comes from

It’s built from Greek parts: tyros (cheese), semeion (sign or mark) and philos (loving). Put together, it’s roughly “a lover of cheese signs.”

What people collect

The classic collectible is the label from a French Camembert box. Camembert has been sold in round wooden boxes for over a century, and the printed labels on them show everything from farm animals and flowers to historical scenes. Collectors trade them, and there is even an organized club: the Club Tyrosémiophile de France, founded in 1960, which holds yearly meetings where members swap labels and share their stories.

Some collections are huge. One widely reported collection runs to more than 250,000 labels from over a hundred countries, though the exact figures differ between sources.

Wrapping up

I like the idea that the paper around a cheese is worth keeping as much as the cheese inside. Do you save labels? Tell me in the comments. To read more, see Atlas Obscura’s piece on cheese label collecting or the Wikipedia entry.