Optic

The story of the word

ὀπτικός came through medieval Latin as the adjective for anything to do with the eye, and English had it by the late 1300s. Euclid wrote an Optics that treats vision as straight rays travelling out from the eye to the object, exactly backwards, and the geometry still works because the lines are the same either way. Ὄψις hides in autopsy, seeing for yourself, and in synopsis, a view of the whole at once.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → Old French → English

First recorded

late 14th century