Why Do We Call It “History”?
The modern English word “history” comes partly from the Latin historia and partly from the French storie (or estoire), but those terms both trace their roots back to the same place. Not coincidentally, that place is one of the bedrocks of Western civilization: ancient Greece.
Going back about as far as we can, the word “history” can be traced to the ancient Greek verb οἶδα (heda), meaning “to know.” From there, the Greek ἵστωρ (histōr) arose, which had a variety of meanings depending on the context. As a noun, it could mean “wise man,” “judge,” “witness,” or simply “one who knows.” As an adjective, it meant “knowing” or “learned.”
The Greek word historia evolved from that histōr root. It originally meant “a learning or knowing by inquiry,” “an account of one’s inquiries,” or simply “inquiry” or “narrative.” That word was borrowed into Latin (also as historia), where it meant “narrative of past events, account, tale, story.” Interestingly, although historia was borrowed from Latin into Old English as stær (or ster or steor) to mean “history, narrative, story,” our modern English word “story” comes from the French storie or estoire.
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As so often happens in English, the modern word is a blend of various influences and threads that can be hard to extricate. But etymologists (those who study the origin of words) note that in post-classical Latin, historia sometimes became istoria, which in Old French became estoire or estorie, meaning “story, chronicle, history.” Of course, it makes sense that “history” and “story” would be linked, given that history is itself a kind of story — perhaps the ultimate story.
According to Merriam-Webster, the term “history” first showed up in English sometime before the 12th century, with the meaning “a chronicle of significant events.” At that point, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was borrowing from both Latin and French.
The term “historian” came later — around the middle of the 15th century, likely from the medieval Latin word historianus. (Sadly, the Old English wyrd-writere, to mean “one who writes an account of events, a historian or historiographer,” never caught on.)
Of course, the world had historians long before the modern term was in use. The Greek scholar Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BCE, is often called the first historian. He’s thought to have been the first to collect historical materials in a systematic and investigative way, to vet their accuracy, and to construct them into a narrative (or a historia).
The Histories (or Historíai in Greek), Herodotus’ lengthy account of the rise of the Persian Empire and the Greco-Persian Wars, is the work that made his reputation. Yet his legacy is controversial: Herodotus is called the “father of history” as well as the “father of lies,” a duality that points to the difficulties of reconstructing the past and the more problematic ways that history can be a story. But it’s worth remembering that whatever the challenges, the root of the term goes back to one of the most fundamental human impulses: the desire to know.
