Etymology

History by Frederick Dielman(1896)

The word history comes ultimately from Ancient Greek [12] (histora), meaning
"inquiry","knowledge from inquiry", or "judge". It was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in
his [13] (Per T Za istorai "Inquiries about Animals"). The ancestor
word is attested early on in Homeric Hymns,Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes' oath, and
in Boiotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either "judge" or "witness", or similar).
The Greek word was borrowed into Classical Latin as historia, meaning 'investigation, inquiry,
research, account, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative,
recorded knowledge of past events, story, narrative'. History was borrowed from Latin (possibly
viaOld Irish or Old Welsh) into Old English as str ('history, narrative, story'), but this word fell out of
use in the late Old English period.[14]
Meanwhile, as Latin became Old French (and Anglo-Norman), historia developed into forms such
as istorie, estoire, andhistorie, with new developments in the meaning: 'account of the events of a
person's life (beginning of the 12th cent.), chronicle, account of events as relevant to a group of
people or people in general (1155), dramatic or pictorial representation of historical events (c1240),
body of knowledge relative to human evolution, science (c1265), narrative of real or imaginary
events, story (c1462)'.[14]
It was from Anglo-Norman that history was borrowed into Middle English, and this time the loan
stuck. It appears in the thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle, but seems to have become a common
word in the late fourteenth century, with an early attestation appearing in John Gower's Confessio
Amantis of the 1390s (VI.1383): 'I finde in a bok compiled | To this matiere an old histoire, | The
which comth nou to mi memoire'. In Middle English, the meaning of history was "story" in general.
The restriction to the meaning 'the branch of knowledge that deals with past events; the formal
record or study of past events, esp. human affairs' arose in the mid-fifteenth century.[14]
With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, and it was in the Greek sense
that Francis Bacon used the term in the late sixteenth century, when he wrote about "Natural
History". For him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time", that sort of
knowledge provided by memory (while science was provided by reason, and poetrywas provided
by fantasy).[15]

In an expression of the linguistic synthetic vs. analytic/isolating dichotomy, English like Chinese (
vs. ) now designates separate words for human history and storytelling in general. In modern
German, French, and most Germanic and Romance languages, which are solidly synthetic and
highly inflected, the same word is still used to mean both "history" and "story".
The adjective historical is attested from 1661, and historic from 1669.[16]
Historian in the sense of a "researcher of history" is attested from 1531. In all European languages,
the substantive "history" is still used to mean both "what happened with men", and "the scholarly
study of the happened", the latter sense sometimes distinguished with a capital letter, "History", or
the word historiography.[13]