Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Metadata
/ˈmɛtədeɪtə/noun
Data that describes other data, such as a file's author, size and date.
The Greek roots
μετά
metá
after, beyond, about
Literally: “beyond the given things”
Follow a root:μετά17 words
The story of the word
Half Greek and half Latin, a mixture purists complained about and everyone else ignored. μετά meant after or alongside; the modern sense of a higher level looking down comes from Aristotle's Metaphysics, a title that originally meant nothing grander than the books shelved after the Physics. Philip Bagley is usually credited with metadata in a 1968 report, by which time metalanguage and metatheory had already worn the path.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1968
Same family
metaphysicsmetamorphosismethodmetabolism
In a sentence
The photograph had been stripped of its metadata, so nobody could say where it was taken.
Half the investigation ran on call metadata rather than call content.