Lacuna (manuscripts)

Okay kiddo, so you know how sometimes you draw on a piece of paper, and then you make a mistake, and you need to erase it or start over on a new paper? Well, sometimes people did that a long time ago too, but with books.

A lacuna is when there's a big space or gap in a page or a whole part of a book where there should be writing or pictures. This might have happened because someone accidentally spilled something on the book, or because a page got ripped or lost over time.

Sometimes people try to fill in the missing parts of the book using their best guesses of what should be there, or by looking at other copies of the same book. But other times, historians just leave it as a blank space because they don't know what was there before.

It's kind of like a puzzle that people are always trying to figure out, but sometimes there are missing pieces that we might never know the answer to, even though we wish we did.