Art & MusicGreek → English
Technique
/tɛkˈniːk/noun
A particular way of carrying out a task, especially one requiring trained skill.
The Greek roots
τέχνη
téchnē
craft, skill, art
Literally: “craft, learned skill”
Follow a root:τέχνη6 words
The story of the word
τέχνη covered carpentry, surgery, poetry and rhetoric alike: a skill that can be taught, as against a gift you are born with. Aristotle set it against ἐπιστήμη, knowledge of why things are so, where τέχνη is knowledge of how to make. French technique brought the noun into English in 1817. Technology once meant the systematic study of the crafts, before the machines took the word over.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1817
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
technologytechnicalpyrotechnicspolytechnic
In a sentence
His technique is unglamorous and he has not lost a match in two years.
She learned the technique from a video and improved it by accident.