Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Analytics
/ˌænəˈlɪtɪks/noun
The systematic examination of data to find patterns worth acting on.
The Greek roots
ἀνά
aná
up, back
λύειν
lýein
to loosen, undo
Literally: “the art of loosening apart”
The story of the word
Aristotle's works on formal logic came down under one title, Ἀναλυτικά, the Prior and Posterior Analytics. The verb behind it, ἀναλύειν, is what you do to a knot or a rope: loosen it back into its parts. English took analytics in the 1590s for exactly that branch of logic, and the dashboard sense of click-throughs and cohorts is a graft made in the last hundred years onto a word Aristotle used for taking an argument apart.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1590s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
analysiscatalystparalysiselectrolysis
In a sentence
The analytics said most readers left halfway down the page.
She moved from marketing into analytics because the numbers argued back.