English Online Dictionary. What means history? What does history mean?
English
Alternative forms
- Hx, hx (chiefly medicine)
- historie (obsolete)
- hystory (nonstandard)
- hystorie (obsolete)
Etymology
From Middle English historie, from Old French estoire, estorie (“chronicle, history, story”) (French histoire), from Latin historia, from Ancient Greek ἱστορίᾱ (historíā, “learning through research”), from ἱστορέω (historéō, “to research, inquire (and) record”), from ἵστωρ (hístōr, “the knowing, wise one”), from Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“see, know”). Doublet of story and storey.
Attested in Middle English in 1393 by John Gower, Confessio Amantis, which was aimed at an educated audience familiar with French and Latin.
Pronunciation
- enPR: hĭsʹt(ə)rē, hĭsʹtrĭ, IPA(key): /ˈhɪs.t(ə.)ɹi/, /ˈhɪs.tɹɪ/
- Hyphenation: his‧to‧ry, hist‧ory
- Rhymes: -ɪstəɹi, -ɪstɹi
Noun
history (countable and uncountable, plural histories)
- The aggregate of past events.
- Synonyms: background, past
- The branch of knowledge that studies the past; the assessment of notable events.
- The portion of the past that is known and recorded by this field of study, as opposed to all earlier and unknown times that preceded it (prehistory).
- (countable) A set of events involving an entity.
- a long and sordid history
- (countable) A record or narrative description of past events.
- Synonyms: account, chronicle, story, tale
- (countable, medicine) A list of past and continuing medical conditions of an individual or family.
- Synonym: medical history
- (countable, computing) A record of previous user events, especially of visited web pages in a browser.
- Synonym: log
- (informal) Something that no longer exists or is no longer relevant.
- (uncountable) Shared experience or interaction.
- (uncountable) A historically significant event.
Usage notes
The chief polysemic ambiguity of the word history in natural language (in a nutshell, "the past" versus "that portion of the past for which written records exist") is handled with the help of a coordinate term pair (prehistory and history) or a qualifier (recorded history), yielding clarifying phrases such as in all of human history and prehistory or in all recorded history.
Derived terms
Related terms
- historiaster
Descendants
- Pitcairn-Norfolk: histrei
Translations
Verb
history (third-person singular simple present histories, present participle historying, simple past and past participle historied)
- (obsolete) To narrate or record.
References
Further reading
- history on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
- “history”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- history in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
- "history" in Raymond Williams, Keywords (revised), 1983, Fontana Press, page 146.
- “history”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
Anagrams
- Toryish, Troyish, roytish
Middle English
Noun
history
- Alternative form of historie