From Latin 'informare' (to give form to, shape the mind) — to inform is literally to put form into someone's understanding.
To give facts or information to someone; to give an essential or formative quality to something; (archaic) to give form or shape to.
From Old French 'enformer,' from Latin 'īnfōrmāre' (to give form to, to shape, to fashion, to form an idea of, to instruct, to educate), built from 'in-' (into) + 'fōrmāre' (to form, shape, mold), from 'fōrma' (form, shape, beauty), possibly from Greek 'morphē' (form) via early borrowing, or from an independent PIE root. The primary metaphor is sculptural: to inform someone is to pour form into the formless — to impose shape on an unstructured mind, as a potter imposes form on clay. In Aristotelian philosophy, 'informatio' was a technical term for the imposition of intelligible form on passive
The word 'information' has undergone one of the greatest semantic expansions in human history. From its origin as 'the shaping of the mind' (Latin 'īnfōrmātiō'), it became a general term for facts and knowledge, then in 1948, Claude Shannon's 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' redefined it as a measurable, quantifiable property of messages — giving rise to information theory, information technology, and the Information Age. A Latin word about mental formation became the defining