Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Optics
/ˈɒptɪks/noun
The science of light and vision, or the lenses and mirrors inside an instrument.
The Greek roots
ὀπτικός
optikós
of sight
Literally: “matters of seeing”
Follow a root:ὀπτικός2 words
The story of the word
Euclid wrote an Optics around 300 BC treating sight as rays leaving the eye rather than entering it, and the word has outlived the theory by more than two thousand years. Alhazen turned the rays around in the eleventh century. English kept optics for the science, then for the hardware, and since the 1970s American political talk has used it for how a thing looks, which drags the word back to ópsis, plain appearance.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
opticianautopsysynopsismyopia
In a sentence
The optics on the telescope were fine; the mount was the problem.
Nobody argued the policy was wrong, only that the optics were terrible.