Words & WritingGreek → English
Analogy
/əˈnælədʒi/noun
A comparison that explains one thing by treating it as working like another.
The Greek roots
ἀνά
aná
according to, up
λόγος
lógos
ratio, reckoning
Literally: “according to ratio”
The story of the word
The word begins in mathematics: ἀναλογία is proportion, the equality of two ratios, 2 to 4 as 3 to 6. Plato and Aristotle carried it across into argument, where the ratios hold between ideas instead of numbers. English took it in the 1540s, and the original sense survives whenever a textbook calls a proportion an analogy. λόγος here means reckoning rather than word, which is the sense that also gives logarithm.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1540s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
logicdialoguecatalogueprologuelogarithm
In a sentence
The analogy with a water pipe holds until you get to voltage.
Every analogy breaks somewhere, and it helps to say where.