Schema
/ˈskiːmə/noun
An organising framework that shapes how information is arranged or understood.
The Greek roots
Literally: “the way a thing holds itself”
The story of the word
σχῆμα comes from ἔχειν, to hold, in the sense of the bearing a thing holds: a dancer's pose, a geometrical figure and a rhetorical turn are all σχήματα. Kant used Schema for the rule that lets a concept meet experience, and Piaget and Bartlett carried it into psychology for the mental frames that sort what we notice. Databases inherited it last. Scheme is the same Greek word arriving earlier through Latin, which is why the two now sound so different in tone.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Children fit new animals into an existing schema until something forces a revision.
Changing the database schema meant rewriting half the queries.