history
/ˈhɪst(ə)ri
/- An honest answer is that we do not know; that is why we do history and study current events.
- The director needs to study social life and history more profoundly and change his course.
- At this point she started to study constitutional history and law.
Synonyms
- Wouldn't it be great if history as a whole could selectively forget its blemishes?
- Harper tried to rewrite or ignore history this whole campaign, and I must admit he did a pretty fine job.
- There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision.
Synonyms
- The series explores the history of evil, what society means by the word evil, where it comes from and what society can do to deal with it.
- Mash, which became one of the most famous series in the history of television, was originally a novel.
- The series about the history of speed and the intense rivalry to be the fastest revisits the golden age of the train.
- You may not be aware that Ueno has quite a history dating back to the early years of the Edo Period when it was just a little swampland.
- Cllr Mary Kelly said the Town Council offices at Market Square had quite an amazing history.
- There's quite a history of it, and in fact it's been a public issue before.
- Perhaps he was just losing his marbles; there was a history of insanity in his family.
- They say the health implications can be particularly serious if there is a family history of high blood pressure.
- Mesereau said he was the victim of a trap set by a family with a history of milking celebrities.
- Local lighthouse enthusiasts could give public accounts of the history and future of their local light.
- It's important to recount the history of that story and the lessons Howard learned.
- It is the highest recorded circulation in the history of the newspaper.
Synonyms
- Most people think that William Shakespeare, who died in 1616, wrote three kinds of plays: comedies, tragedies and histories.
- In high school, teachers spend a great deal of time guiding students through the rigors of Shakespeare's tragedies and histories, but what about the comedies?
- And you can see the influence of Shakespeare's histories in the emphasis on grieving fathers and sons, and the cyclical nature of violence.
Phrases
be history
go down in history
make history
the rest is history
Origin
Late Middle English (also as a verb): via Latin from Greek historia 'finding out, narrative, history', from histōr 'learned, wise man', from an Indo-European root shared by wit2.
History goes back to a very ancient root that is also the source of Latin videre ‘to see’ (see view) and of the Old English word wit ‘to have knowledge’. More immediately it came from Greek historia ‘finding out, narrative, history’. In its earliest use in English a history was not necessarily assumed to be true: it could be any narrative or story, an idea echoed by the American motor manufacturer Henry Ford (1863–1947) when he said ‘History is more or less bunk.’ To make history, ‘to do something that influences the course of history’, dates from the mid 19th century. A less positive view of history appears in the phrase to be history, ‘to be dead or no longer relevant to the present’, which is recorded from the 1930s.