Origins
The word 'history' descends from one of the great intellectual achievements of ancient Greece: the idea that the past can be investigated systematically rather than simply received as myth. It comes from Greek 'historía' (ἱστορία), meaning 'inquiry, investigation, knowledge obtained by inquiry,' from 'histōr' (ἵστωρ), meaning 'a learned man, a judge, one who knows.'
The deeper etymology of 'histōr' connects it to the PIE root *wid-, meaning 'to see' and by extension 'to know' (seeing and knowing being equated across many Indo-European languages). This root is extraordinarily productive: it gave Greek 'idein' (to see, whence English 'idea'), Latin 'vidēre' (to see, whence 'video,' 'vision,' 'provide,' 'evident'), Sanskrit 'veda' (sacred knowledge), and Germanic words including 'wit,' 'wise,' 'wisdom,' and 'witness.' A historian is, at the deepest etymological level, 'one who knows because he has seen' — an eyewitness, or someone who has sought out eyewitnesses.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, writing around 440 BCE, opened his great work with the declaration: 'This is the presentation of the historíēs [inquiries] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus.' The word choice was deliberate and groundbreaking. 'Historía' in Herodotus does not mean 'a story about the past' — it means 'the results of my investigation.' He was distinguishing his method from the poets and mythographers who preceded him: where Homer sang of the Trojan War as received from the Muses, Herodotus traveled, interviewed witnesses, compared accounts, and evaluated evidence. The word 'history' thus carries within it the DNA of the empirical method.
Literary History
Thucydides, writing a generation after Herodotus, sharpened the concept further. His history of the Peloponnesian War was more rigorous in its skepticism and its insistence on firsthand evidence. Between Herodotus and Thucydides, 'historía' established itself as a distinct genre of intellectual inquiry, separate from poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric.
Latin borrowed the Greek word as 'historia,' and it entered Old French in a dual form: 'estoire' (the popular form, which eventually produced English 'story') and 'histoire' (the learned form, which retained the classical sense of 'historical narrative'). This is one of the most important doublets in the English lexicon: 'history' and 'story' are the same word, split by the centuries into a factual sense and a fictional one. In French, 'histoire' still means both 'history' and 'story,' and the context must decide.
Middle English borrowed 'historie' from Old French around 1390, initially using it to mean 'a narrative of events, a chronicle.' The modern disciplinary sense — history as a field of study, an analytical endeavor — solidified during the Renaissance, when humanist scholars returned to the methods of Herodotus and Thucydides and insisted on critical examination of sources.
Word Formation
The family of English derivatives is large: 'historian' (one who writes or studies history), 'historic' (significant in history), 'historical' (pertaining to history), 'historiography' (the study of how history is written), 'prehistory' (before written records). The prefix 'pre-' in 'prehistory' is telling — it defines the boundary of 'history' proper as the era of written inquiry, reinforcing the link between 'historía' and the practice of reading, recording, and investigating.