History (etymology)

The word history is ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European *wid-tor-, from the root *weid-, "to know, to see". This root is also present in the English word wit, in latin words vision and video, in the Sanskrit word veda, and in the Slavic word videti and vedati, as well as others (The asterisk before a word indicates that it is a hypothetical construction, not an attested form.)

The Ancient Greek word ἱστορία, istoría, means "knowledge acquired by investigation, inquiry". Is that sense that made use Aristotle in his Περί Τά Ζωα Ιστορία, Peri Ta Zoa Istória or, in latinized form, Historia Animalium. The term is derived from ἵστωρ, hístōr meaning wise man, witness, or judge. We can see early attestations of ἵστωρ in Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes' oath, and in Boiotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either "judge" or "witness," or similar). The spirant is problematic, and not present in cognate Greek eídomai ("to appear"). The form historeîn, "to inquire", is an Ionic derivation, which spread first in Classical Greece and ultimately over all of Hellenistic civilization.

Is still in the greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in late XVI century, when he talk about "Natural History". For him, historia is "the knowledge of objects determining by space and time", that sort of knowledge provided by memory (while science was provided by reason, and poetry was provided by fantasy). Though this, because these knowledge is many times described in a narrative or descritive form, the word "record of facts", specifically ordained in a chronological form.

The word entered the English language in 1390 with the meaning of "relation of incidents, story". In Middle English, the meaning was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "record of past events", in the sense of Herodotus, arises in the late 15th century. In German, French, and indeed, most neolatinian and germanic languages, this distinction was never made, and the same word is used to mean both "history" and "story". The adjective historical is attested from 1561, and historic from 1669.

Historian in the sense of a "researcher of history", however, is attested from 1531, and in all european langages, the substantive "history" is still used to mean "what happened with men" and "the scholar study of the happened" (the german langage have attempted to disguish between Histoire and Geschichte, but it was failed). One adopted solution is write the study of history with capital letter, History. Another used solution is reserve the word historiography for the last sense.