Words & WritingGreek → English
Etymology
/ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/noun
The study of where words come from and how their forms and meanings have shifted.
The Greek roots
ἔτυμον
étymon
the true sense
λόγος
lógos
word, account
Literally: “the account of the true sense”
The story of the word
Étymos meant true, and the Stoics who built the discipline believed the oldest form of a word revealed the real nature of the thing it named. Modern etymology dropped that belief and kept the label, which leaves it one of the few sciences still named after a theory it abandoned. Etymon survives as the technical term for the ancestor form itself.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
etymonphilologylogic
In a sentence
The etymology of the word turned out to be duller than the story everyone tells about it.