The word history comes from the root *weid-, "to know, to see".[8] This root is also present in the English words wit, wise, wisdom, vision, and idea, in the Sanskrit word veda,[9]The Ancient Greek word ἱστορία, historía, means "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation".
It was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in his Περὶ Τὰ Ζῷα Ἱστορίαι, Peri Ta Zoa Ηistoriai or, in Latinized form, Historia Animalium.[11] 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 εἴδομαι - eídomai ("to appear"). The form ἱστορεῖν - historeîn, "to inquire", is an Ionic derivation, which spread first in Classical Greece and ultimately over all of Hellenistic civilization.
It was still in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th 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 poetry was provided by fantasy).
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" arises in the late 15th century. In German, French, and most Germanic and Romance languages, the same word is still used to mean both "history" and "story". The adjective historical is attested from 1661, and historic from 1669.[12]
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.[11]
Historiography is the history of history, the aspect of history and of semiotics that considers how knowledge of the past, either recent or distant, is obtained and transmitted.[1] Formally, historiography examines the writing of history, the use of historical methods, drawing upon authorship, sources, interpretation, style, bias, and the reader; moreover, historiography also denotes a body of historical work.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, at the ascent of academic history, a corpus of historiography literature developed, including What is History? (1961), by E. H. Carr, and Metahistory (1973), by Hayden White.
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