Myth & LegendGreek → English
Mythology
/mɪˈθɒlədʒi/noun
A body of traditional stories about gods and heroes, or the study of them.
The Greek roots
μῦθος
mŷthos
story, spoken tale
-λογία
-logía
account, study
Literally: “the telling of tales”
The story of the word
For Homer μῦθος was simply speech, anything said out loud, with no hint of falsehood. Plato set it against λόγος, reasoned argument, and that opposition gave the word its modern smell of untruth. Μυθολογία in Greek meant the telling of stories, not the scholarly analysis of them, and the academic sense is an eighteenth-century development.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Middle French → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
Same family
mythmythicallogic
In a sentence
Half the constellation names come straight out of Greek mythology.