Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Ontology
/ɑnˈtɑlədʒi/noun
The branch of philosophy that asks what kinds of things exist.
The Greek roots
ὄν
ón
being, that which is
λόγος
lógos
study, account
Literally: “study of being”
The story of the word
Greeks argued about being for eight centuries without a noun for the discipline. The word was assembled in Latin by German scholastics, printed as ontologia in Rudolf Goclenius's philosophical lexicon of 1613 and pushed into general use by Christian Wolff. Computing took it back in the 1990s for a formal list of the entity types a system assumes, which is nearer to Aristotle's Categories than most engineers who write one realise.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
ontogenypaleontologyontological
In a sentence
His objection was ontological: numbers, he said, do not exist in the way chairs do.
The team spent three weeks arguing over the ontology before writing a line of code.