Syntax
/ˈsɪntæks/noun
The rules governing how words combine into phrases and sentences.
The Greek roots
Literally: “arranging together”
The story of the word
τάξις is a military word before it is a grammatical one: troops drawn up in ranks, which is where tactics comes from too. Alexandrian scholars used σύνταξις for the ordering of words, and Apollonius Dyscolus wrote a treatise on it in the second century AD that later grammar leaned on for a thousand years. English took syntax in the 1570s. Programming borrowed it whole, so a syntax error is a complaint about word order from a machine with no idea what the words mean.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1570s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
German syntax puts the verb where an English speaker keeps waiting for it.
The compiler flagged a syntax error on line 40: a missing bracket, as usual.