Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Demography
/dɪˈmɑːɡrəfi/noun
The statistical study of populations: births, deaths, migration and the shape of an age pyramid.
The Greek roots
δῆμος
dêmos
the people, a district
γράφω
gráphō
I write
Literally: “writing about the people”
The story of the word
Achille Guillard coined démographie in 1855 for what he called the natural and social history of the human species, and English took it up in the 1880s once governments had census data worth analysing. δῆμος was a concrete thing in Athens, the village or ward where a citizen was registered, and your deme is where your political existence came from. The same root gives democracy and epidemic, the thing that runs through the people.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
Same family
democracyepidemicdemagogueendemic
In a sentence
The demography of the region changed faster than the housing did.
You cannot argue with demography, only plan around it.