The Etymology of Etymology

I wasn’t always obsessed with the origins of words. Growing up, it was fun to play with letters and words, but finding out where they had come from felt like one of those things that was hard to find out.

I’ve described the drunk octopus phenomenon, wherein it’s tremendously easier to find answers to questions today. Here’s how I described the way things used to be:

Unfortunately, I learned to suppress this instinct as life dragged on. Why? Because it has been very, very difficult to find answers to questions for most of my life. If you wanted to know the answer to something fairly complex or nonintuitive back in the day, you needed to read books.

No problem—I loved reading books! The only problems were figuring out which books might contain the answers you were looking for, and then actually getting your hands on them.

This probably explains why it has been so much fun to discover the origins of words these past few years: it’s easy, and there is a satisfying reward at the end. So, that’s my own origin with my obsession with etymology, and today I want to tell the story of the origin of the word etymology.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably already identified the ending of the word. That -ology part generally always talks about a field of study, like psychology or archaeology. This traces back to the Greek word logos, which is a word that can mean word.

Logos and logic share a common root, and you can see how the ancient Greeks thought of the two as intertwined at first. Words and reason went hand in hand.

Etymon, the first part of the word, means something like the true meaning. If you put these two things together, you get the true meaning of a word.

There’s a bit more to the story of the Greek word etymon. Etymon itself also referred to the origin of a word, not just truth in the abstract sense. This introduces recursion into etymología (ἐτυμολογία), where the second part implies reasoning about the origins of etymons, the true meanings of the word.

We want to know the truth about where the original word came from, then.

Greek etymología became the Latin word etymologia, and you can probably imagine the rest of the journey through Vulgar Latin and on into modern French, and then into English.

So, there you have it: the etymology of etymology!